The coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago.

I hadn't noticed. I was still holding the mug, both hands wrapped around ceramic that no longer offered any warmth, staring at my phone screen like it might rearrange itself into something that made sense.

It didn't.

*Mon trésor, je t'attendrai.*

Ryker's comment sat there at the top of the memorial post, pinned by likes. Fifteen of them. Fifteen people had pressed a little heart on the most devastating thing I'd ever read, and not one of them knew what I knew.

Last Tuesday, sitting right here at this same kitchen island, I'd asked Ryker if he wanted to send flowers to Elodie Marchand's family. He'd shrugged, poured himself a glass of water, and said, *I wouldn't even know what to write. I barely know French beyond 'bonjour.'*

I set the mug down before I dropped it.

My fingers were already moving, opening the translation app. I already knew what it meant — some buried corner of my brain had caught the shape of the words the moment I'd read them — but I needed the screen to confirm it. I needed something outside my own head to tell me I wasn't misreading this.

*My treasure, I will wait for you.*

The kitchen felt very quiet. Outside, Seattle was doing its usual gray morning thing, low clouds pressing down against the window glass, a bus hissing past on the wet street below. Normal sounds. Normal world. Nothing had changed out there.

Everything had changed in here.

I went to Elodie's profile.

I told myself to be methodical. I told myself not to spiral. I scrolled slowly, the way you do when you're looking for something and terrified you'll find it.

December. A grid of Aspen photos — powder snow, blue sky, that particular golden light that only exists at high altitude. In the third one, Ryker stood behind a woman with dark curly hair and a red ski jacket, his arms looped around her waist, both of them laughing at something off-camera. The kind of photo where no one's performing for the lens. The kind where they've forgotten anyone else exists.

I remembered that day.

I remembered sitting on our couch with takeout going stale on the coffee table, waiting for him to call. He'd finally picked up around nine, his voice slightly thick, and said the guys he'd been skiing with had come down with something. *Food poisoning, probably. I've just been hanging out in the lodge by myself, babe. Kind of a wasted trip.* He'd sounded tired. Lonely, even. I'd felt bad for him.

I kept scrolling.

February. Elodie at the Space Needle, her smile wide, the city spread out silver behind her. The location tag said Seattle. I stared at the date until the numbers stopped looking like numbers.

That week. That exact week. Ryker had told me a client was in town, someone from the Tokyo office who needed hand-holding through a series of dinners and site visits. He'd come home on Friday smelling like rain and restaurant kitchens, kissed me on the cheek, and fallen asleep on the couch with his shoes still on. I'd pulled a blanket over him. I'd thought, *he works so hard.*

The coffee mug was still sitting there. I pushed it away.

She'd been here. She'd been in my city, and he'd been with her, and I had pulled a blanket over him when he came home.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the gray outside the window to shift into something slightly lighter. Long enough for the sounds of the apartment to start filtering back in — the hum of the refrigerator, a car alarm somewhere distant, and then, from down the hall, the familiar creak of the bedroom floorboards.

I moved fast.

Phone face-down on the counter. Shoulders back. I picked up my cold coffee like it was something I'd been meaning to drink.

"Morning, babe." My voice came out steady. I don't know how.

Ryker appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was shirtless, hair still flattened on one side, eyes carrying that bruised, swollen look he'd had every morning for the past week. He'd cried at the news, actually cried, sitting on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands while I rubbed his back and told him it was okay to grieve. *She was your friend,* I'd said. *Of course it hurts.*

I watched him cross the kitchen. Thirty-one years old, broad-shouldered, the small tattoo on his left forearm that I'd traced with my finger a hundred times. He was the person I knew better than anyone. He was a stranger.

He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. His face pressed into the curve of my neck, warm breath against my skin, and I felt my whole body go rigid before I forced it to relax.

"Thank you," he murmured. "For being so patient with me this week. You've just—" He exhaled. "You're my angel, Willow. You know that?"

*Mon trésor, je t'attendrai.*

The translation looped through my head on repeat. I made my hand reach up and cover his. I made my fingers squeeze.

"What do you want for breakfast?" I asked.

He lifted his head. Kissed the back of my neck once, soft and absent, the way you kiss someone when you've stopped really seeing them. "I'll just do coffee. You don't have to make anything."

He let go of me and moved to the machine, pulling a mug from the cabinet. His back was to me. His phone was on the counter.

I wasn't going to look at it. I had enough. I had more than enough already, and whatever came next I could figure out from a safe distance, somewhere that wasn't this kitchen, somewhere that wasn't standing three feet from him while my chest felt like it was slowly caving in.

Then the screen lit up.

A message preview. Just long enough to read before it dimmed.

*The French girl's things arrived. Come pick them up. — M*

I stopped breathing.

The French girl.

Elodie Marchand had been dead for eight days. She had died on a mountain in Colorado, in an accident that the news had described as a tragic fall, and Ryker had come home from that same mountain, claimed he'd heard about it from mutual friends, and cried in our bedroom.

And now someone was holding her things. For him. Because apparently he had a right to them.

The coffee machine finished with a soft beep. Ryker reached for his mug without turning around.

I looked at the back of his head. At the familiar slope of his shoulders. At the phone on the counter between us, screen dark again, quiet as a secret.

My hand moved toward it before I could think about whether I wanted to know.

I slid Ryker’s phone into my pocket the second he turned on the espresso machine. The noise covered the slip of my hand, the tap of glass against denim, and my pulse—sharp, frantic—was the only sound I could hear inside my own head.

He didn’t notice. He never noticed, not when he thought I was doing something as benign as rinsing a mug or grabbing my robe. I caught a glimpse of his reflection in the microwave door: hunched shoulders, head bent, the lines at the corners of his eyes deeper than they’d been even a week ago. Guilt or grief, I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. Maybe neither.

I mumbled something about needing a shower and retreated down the hall, my feet silent on the old wood floor. The phone was slick in my palm, pre-warmed by his skin.

In the bathroom, I locked the door and started the water—too hot, so it sent a hiss of steam into the air, fogging the mirror in seconds. I turned on the fan for good measure. As if he could hear my heartbeat through the wall. As if he could hear the sudden, hungry way I was breathing, the way my hand shook as I unlocked his phone.

Four years of sharing everything. Passwords, PINs, passcodes. The illusion of transparency, so thorough I’d stopped even thinking about it. My fingers hesitated for a second, then typed in his birthday. The phone opened with a soft, traitorous click.

I went straight to his messages. I didn’t bother with the notifications—my mind was already constructing a thousand stories, each worse than the last. I scrolled to the bottom, found the thread from “M.” No photo. Just a blank gray circle and a number I didn’t recognize. Three messages, stacked on top of each other like tiny grenades waiting to go off.

First: "She left a box for you."

Second: "Pickup by Friday or I burn it."

Third—the one from this morning: "The French girl's things arrived. Come pick them up. — M"

My hands were already sweating. I scrolled up, but there was nothing before this week. No history, no evidence of who M was. I wanted to believe it was mercenary, clinical. That he’d only wanted to tie up loose ends for someone he barely knew. But the words didn’t fit that story. None of this fit that story anymore.

I closed the messages, breathing through my nose, trying to keep my hands steady. There was a part of me that wanted—needed—to stop. To drop the phone, step into the shower, scorch the questions out of my skin with water so hot it hurt. But I couldn’t. Not now. Not after everything I’d seen.

I opened his photos.

The first row was us. Birthday candles, blurry selfies, a shot of the Space Needle through rain-streaked glass. I scrolled down. Past Christmas, past the Fourth of July. My thumb moved faster, the images blurring. Until they didn’t. Until she appeared.

Elodie. Not the carefully curated Elodie from Instagram—sunlit, always just out of reach. These were different. Raw. Alive. In our kitchen, holding a spatula with one hand and a glass of red wine in the other, her hair twisted up in a messy knot. Laughing, head thrown back, standing in front of the fridge I’d bought with Ryker last spring.

In his car—my seat, the passenger seat—her face turned to the camera, lips pursed, eyes wide and silly. The faint outline of his tattoo visible in the reflection of the window.

The bed. Our bed. She was curled on her side, knees tucked up, Ryker’s gray hoodie swallowing her frame. She looked back at the camera with a half-smile, as if she’d just been caught in the act of something secret. I felt the room tilt. I remembered that hoodie. I’d searched for it last winter, convinced I’d left it at my sister’s. I’d missed it, missed the way it smelled like detergent and his skin.

I clicked on a video. Seventeen seconds. The thumbnail was Elodie’s face, close to the lens, eyes shining in the way people’s eyes do when they’re about to say something they shouldn’t. She spoke in French, words soft and low. Behind the camera, Ryker laughed—his real laugh, not the one he gave to clients or neighbors or even me, sometimes. The sound made my stomach twist.

I didn’t trust myself to listen, so I opened the translation app, holding the phone up to the speaker. The text bloomed on the screen like an accusation:

"Tell me, this time you’re serious. Tell me you’ll leave her for me."

My own breath turned jagged. The video ended with a thump, a giggle, and then the sound of Ryker’s voice: "I promise."

I closed the app. The steam from the shower had fogged the entire mirror, beads of condensation running down the glass in uneven trails. I watched my own reflection blur, then disappear.

A knock at the door. "Willow?" Ryker’s voice, muffled by wood and water. "The water stopped—are you okay?"

I swallowed, fighting to keep my voice from splintering. "Yeah, I— I can’t find my makeup remover. Give me a few minutes?"

He hesitated. I could hear the suspicion, the edge of something unfamiliar in his silence. I wiped the phone clean—messages closed, photos cleared from the screen, translation app erased from recent tabs. I checked the volume, the lock screen. Everything as it had been. Everything normal.

I tucked the phone into the pocket of my robe. I rinsed my face with cold water, hoping it would wash away the flush in my cheeks, the tremor in my hands. The bathroom smelled like eucalyptus and panic.

I opened the door.

Ryker was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed now, his phone clutched tight between both hands. He looked up at me, and for a second I saw something in his eyes I’d never seen before. Not grief. Not even guilt.

Fear.

He stood, the phone nearly trembling in his grip. His voice was rough around the edges, like he’d been swallowing glass. "Willow, I need to go out for a few hours. There’s— a friend, something I need to handle. Could you— could you go to your sister’s for the day?"

I stared at him, at the way his shoulders hunched, the way his eyes darted from my face to the floor and back again. The box. Elodie’s box—somewhere out there, waiting for him. Or for me. Or for both of us.

I forced a smile. "Sure," I said. "Whatever you need."

Outside, the city was still gray, but inside, the air felt sharp, expectant. I wondered which of us would find the box first.

Harper took one look at my face and pulled me inside before I could even say hello.

She didn't ask if I was okay. She didn't say anything at all, just wrapped one hand around my arm and steered me past the entryway, past the neat row of shoes she kept by the door, past the framed print of downtown Seattle that I'd helped her hang three years ago. Her apartment smelled like coffee and something citrusy, clean and ordered in the way her whole life was ordered. I'd always envied that about her.

Right now I wanted to collapse into it.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on her kitchen stool and started unwinding my scarf. My fingers felt clumsy, like they belonged to someone else. Harper was already at the counter, and I heard the soft clink of glass, and then she set a lowball of whiskey in front of me. Not coffee. Whiskey, at eleven in the morning, without a word of explanation.

She sat down across from me and folded her hands on the counter.

"Willow," she said. "You look like someone who just found out her man's been sleeping with a ghost."

I laughed. It came out wrong, too sharp, too close to a sob. I pressed my fingers against my mouth.

Then I started crying.

I didn't mean to. I'd told myself the whole drive over that I was going to be calm about this, methodical, the way Harper always was. I was going to lay out the facts in order and let her respond and we were going to make a plan. I was not going to fall apart on her kitchen stool like a person who had no idea what to do next.

But the scarf was finally off, and the whiskey was sitting right there, and Harper was looking at me with that particular expression she reserved for clients who'd been holding themselves together for too long — not pity, just recognition — and something in me just gave.

I told her everything.

The comment on the memorial post. The Aspen photos. The February location tag. The video, seventeen seconds, Elodie's voice asking him to leave me, and Ryker's laugh, and his answer. The message from M. The box.

Harper didn't interrupt. She didn't gasp or reach across to touch my hand. She just listened, her eyes steady, her expression shifting in small ways that I'd learned to read over thirty years — a slight tightening around the mouth when something landed hard, a barely-there nod when she was filing something away.

When I finished, the apartment was very quiet.

Then Harper stood up.

She didn't say anything. She walked to the front door and turned the deadbolt, then moved through the living room pulling the curtains closed one by one, the gray morning light narrowing and then disappearing behind each panel of fabric. I watched her, my hands wrapped around the whiskey glass I still hadn't touched.

"Harper—"

"Give me a second."

She disappeared into her home office. I heard a drawer open, the soft sound of a laptop being lifted. When she came back, she set it on the counter between us and opened it without sitting down.

"I've handled forty-three divorce cases in the last two years," she said, her voice flat and precise. "Eleven of them involved affairs. Six of those involved a third party who was somehow connected to both spouses. And two of them—" She paused, pulling up a browser tab. "Two of them involved a third party who died under circumstances that were never fully explained."

I stared at her. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I've seen this before." She turned the laptop toward me. "Not this exactly. But the shape of it."

On the screen was a news article. Local, small, the kind that gets buried under bigger headlines within a day. The headline read: *Woman Dies in Fall at Cascade Viewpoint; Authorities Investigating.* Below it, a photo of a trailhead, yellow tape, the kind of gray sky that could be any day in Washington.

Elodie Marchand. Thirty-two years old. Found at the base of an overlook on a trail that saw maybe a dozen hikers a week at this time of year. No witnesses. Police were calling it a probable accident, pending further review.

"Probable," Harper said, like the word tasted bad. She pointed at a paragraph near the bottom of the article. "Her backpack wasn't recovered at the scene."

I leaned closer. "They mention that here?"

"No. I called the station this morning." She said it simply, without any drama, the way she said everything. "I have a contact there. I asked some questions."

I sat back. My chest felt strange, too tight in some places and hollowed out in others. "Harper. When did you—how long have you been—"

"Since you texted me at seven-thirty asking if you could come over." She closed the laptop. "You never ask to come over without a reason. And you sounded—" She stopped. "You sounded like you needed a lawyer, not a sister."

I picked up the whiskey and finally drank some. It burned in a way that felt almost useful.

"A徒步 hiker doesn't lose their backpack in a fall," Harper said. "They go down with it, or it lands nearby. It doesn't disappear. Which means either someone took it before anyone arrived, or someone took it after. Either way, someone knew to go back for it."

The word *someone* sat between us like something with weight.

"I need you to do three things," Harper said. She held up one finger. "First. Don't touch his phone again. He's going to start being careful now — he's already scared, you could see it. You said he was holding his phone like it might bite him. That means he knows something's wrong, even if he doesn't know what you've seen."

I nodded.

"Second." Another finger. "That box. Whatever M is holding for him — you need to find it tonight. Before he gets to it. I think Elodie left something behind deliberately. People who know they're in dangerous situations sometimes do. A paper trail, a letter, a drive. Something that explains what she knew."

"You think she knew she was in danger."

Harper looked at me steadily. "I think a woman who asks a married man to leave his wife, and records him saying he will, is a woman who's building a case. Just in case."

Just in case.

I thought about the video. The way she'd looked into the camera. Not at Ryker — at the camera. Like she'd known, even in that moment, that she might need it later.

"Third," Harper said. "I'm going to run her background through the firm's investigative contacts. A French national who's been in Seattle multiple times with no visible visa trail, no company affiliation, nothing on public record — that's not normal. That's someone who was very careful about not being found."

I turned the whiskey glass in my hands. "Or someone who was being hidden."

Harper's expression shifted, just slightly. "Yes," she said. "That too."

We sat with that for a moment. Outside, a car passed slowly, its tires loud on the wet pavement. The curtains didn't move.

I was about to ask her where to even start with the box — how to find M, how to get there before Ryker did — when my phone buzzed against the counter.

Ryker.

I looked at Harper. She gave me a single, small nod.

I picked up.

"Hey—"

"Willow." His voice was wrong. Frayed at the edges, like something had pulled it apart and he'd tried to put it back together too fast. "I— babe, I messed up. I need you to come home. Right now. Please."

In the background, faint but unmistakable, I heard sirens.

"Ryker, what happened?"

A long pause. The kind that isn't silence, that's full of breathing and held-back words and something that sounds a lot like fear.

"Just come home," he said. "Please."

I met Harper's eyes across the counter. She'd heard it too — the sirens, the shake in his voice. Her expression hadn't changed, but her hand moved to her phone.

I kept my voice even. "I'm on my way."