Nadia's POV
She had a meeting with him.
Four words. That is all it takes to change it all.
I put Marcus's phone back where I'd found it, just like that. Screen down, slightly left-tilted. Same as last time. My hands are not trembling. That surprises me somewhat. In my old life, my hands shook at everything. Bad news. Hard conversations. The second before I had to tell a family their person wasn't coming home. And my hands were honest then. My face was concealing the truth they said.
Not right now.
I lie down next to Marcus again and stare at the ceiling and count his breaths.
Number one. 2. 3.
He is sleeping well. The breath of a man without guilt keeping him awake, which tells me all I need to know about the kind of person he really is under the easy smiles and the perfectly timed kisses on the top of my head. Guilt needs a conscience. Marcus is sleeping like a baby because he has accepted what he is doing. At some point he decided I was worth less than whatever they told him. And then he closed his eyes and slept fairly well.
I wait until 4 o clock.
Then I stand up.
The kitchen is dark. I don't turn on the light. I sit down at the table with my second phone, the one Marcus doesn't know about, the one I bought with cash three days after I woke up, and open a new message with Kieran's number.
I type 5 words.
They know. Lift the plan.
I look at the message for three seconds. Then I send it and put the phone in the pocket of my robe and sit in the dark and think.
Kieran knows. So they've had eyes on Heron Street since this morning. Which means the photo—the one that had been sent to both our phones, the one taken from behind the blue van—wasn't just a warning. It was a proof of delivery. Somebody was already pushing the info upstream before we'd even finished talking.
We were being watched before we got there.
We were standing there, being told on.
And Marcus was four blocks away at seven AM, like a chess piece on a board I didn't know I was playing.
My power is cool and flat in my chest. Not the usual warm throb. Something tougher. As if it is done being patient and waiting for me to catch up.
The folder comes to mind. ASSET STATUS: PRI 1. I think about the word informant next to my husband's name on a government file that predates my ever waking up in these clean sheets. I think of how many mornings just like this one we had in my last life--him humming, me trusting, both of us playing out a version of normal that was based on totally different foundations.
He knew what I was before I knew.
He was put in my life to search for it.
That thought dwells in my chest like a stone thrown into deep water. It doesn't make a splash. It just goes down. And tumbles down. And drops.
I go back to bed at 4:30am.
Before Marcus is up I am dressed and in the kitchen. Coffee's done. Face set. The me he expects to be standing exactly where he expects her to be.
He enters at six and his smile is punctual. Now I have started measuring his smiles in fractions of a second. Slow paced real ones. His are immediate. Ready and made before he even see my face."
"You're up early." "Early shift," I reply. "Didn't want to disturb you.
He fills his coffee. His eyes scan me the way they always do, not with love, I know now, but with appraisal. Inventory check. Check that nothing's changed. I want to make sure I'm still the same Nadia he's been reporting on, the one who doesn't know, the one who trusts the wrong people and sleeps well and has no idea her whole life is a container someone else built around her.
Have a good shift," he says. I will," I say.
I grab my bag, walk to the door, open the door.
And then I stop.
Because Something's amiss.
I don't know what it is yet. It is not noise. It is not seeing. It is my ability to react to something in the apartment behind me that my brain has not caught up to yet, suddenly awake, suddenly screaming, slamming against my ribs like it is trying to break out.
I turn slowly around.
Marcus is at the kitchen counter pouring his coffee. His back is to me. He has not stirred. He looks exactly like he did ten seconds ago.
Except his phone is in-hand.
And he's typing.
6:14 a.m. Before he's had a single sip of coffee. Even before he looks at the news. The first thing Marcus Voss does as I walk out the door is to pick up his phone and type a message.
I watch the back of his head.
I memorize the angle of his shoulders.
I count to three.
Then I shut the front door and I don't breathe, I stay perfectly still in the hall outside and I shut the front door loudly the way someone leaving sounds.
Ten seconds.
20. 21.
My second phone vibrates in my bag.
I slowly draw it out.
Text from Kieran. Sent forty seconds ago, which means it came in before any of this, I was still in the apartment, Marcus was still sleeping.
I have read it.
And all of the air leaves my body.
Because that's all Kieran's message says: Don't go to the hospital today. Darnell isn't who you think he is. His name was in the files. He's been in the program longer than Marcus. That security desk he was put at eight months ago before you woke up.
Darnell.
Quiet, kind Darnell who stood up straight because I remembered he had a daughter.
Darnell, who I already trusted.
Darnell who I already let in on my plans.
I can hear Marcus's voice now behind the door I just slammed--low and cautious and for one person on the other end of a phone call he made the moment he thought I was gone.
I lean against the wall.
I shut my eyes.
I've been so careful.Ruthless, surgical precision.
And I just told a man who was watching me before I ever woke up the inside of my plan."