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."

The drive home took eleven minutes. I know because I counted every one of them, watching the clock on Harper's dashboard while she followed two car lengths behind me, close enough that I could see her headlights in my rearview mirror the whole way. She hadn't asked if I wanted her to come. She'd just grabbed her keys.

I was grateful for that. I didn't trust myself to ask for anything right now.

The red and blue light hit me before I even turned off the engine. It strobed through the front windows of our building in slow, rhythmic sweeps, painting the brick wall of the lobby in colors that felt wrong against the gray morning. A patrol car was parked at the curb, not blocking traffic, just sitting there. Patient. Like it had all the time in the world.

I pushed open the front door.

Two detectives. Our sofa. Ryker in the armchair with his face buried in both hands, shoulders shaking in a way I'd only ever seen once before, at his father's funeral six years ago.

The woman stood first. She was maybe forty, dark hair pulled back, the kind of face that gave nothing away. Her partner stayed seated, a notepad balanced on his knee, pen already moving.

"Harper Sinclair?" she said. "I'm Detective Reyes. We have a few questions about Elodie Marchand."

The blood left my body from the feet up.

I heard myself speak from somewhere very far away. "I'm Willow. He's—" I stopped. Swallowed. "I'm his fiancée. Willow Cross."

Reyes's eyebrow moved. Just barely. Just enough.

She wrote something down.

---

I sat in the chair nearest the window, the one I always curled up in to read on Sunday mornings. It felt wrong to be sitting in it now, straight-backed, hands folded in my lap like a person at a job interview. Ryker hadn't looked up since I came in. His breathing was ragged and wet, the kind that comes after crying has gone on too long.

Reyes stood near the fireplace. Her partner, who hadn't introduced himself, stayed on the sofa and kept writing.

"Ms. Cross," Reyes said, "we've reclassified Elodie Marchand's death as a suspicious death as of this morning. The medical examiner found bruising on her neck inconsistent with a fall. The pattern suggests manual pressure applied prior to the time of death."

The room was very quiet except for Ryker's breathing.

"Additionally," Reyes continued, "the last call Ms. Marchand made before she disappeared on the Cascade trail was to your fiancé's number. The call lasted forty-seven minutes."

I looked at Ryker. He still hadn't lifted his head.

"In his initial statement," Reyes said, "Mr. Sinclair described his relationship with Ms. Marchand as a casual friendship." She paused. "He's since amended that statement. He's told us there was an—" she glanced down at the notepad in her partner's hands "—emotional intimacy between them."

She looked at me then. Directly, the way people look when they want to watch the exact moment something lands.

"Were you aware of that relationship, Ms. Cross?"

Across the room, Ryker finally raised his head. His eyes found mine immediately, red-rimmed, desperate, the look of a man reaching for the last thing he has left. A plea. A question. *Please,* those eyes said. *Please.*

I had three seconds.

Three seconds to decide what kind of woman I was going to be in this room. The betrayed fiancée who'd been kept in the dark — shocked, wounded, but loyal. Or something else. Something that would put me on the wrong side of a detective who already knew more than she was showing.

I let my face do the work I'd practiced on the drive over. I let my chin drop slightly, let my eyes fill, let the breath catch in my throat the way it does when something hits you somewhere soft and unprotected.

"I found out this morning," I said. My voice came out quieter than I intended, which was actually better. "He— he hadn't told me. I didn't know what they were to each other until today."

Reyes didn't react. She just wrote.

"The forty-seven minute call," she said. "You weren't aware of that?"

"No."

From the armchair, Ryker made a sound. Low, involuntary, like something breaking in a place too deep to reach. I didn't look at him.

Reyes's partner finally spoke. His voice was younger than I expected. "Ms. Cross, do you know if Mr. Sinclair ever visited Ms. Marchand in person? Outside of group settings?"

I thought of the photos. The kitchen. My seat in his car. The gray hoodie I'd spent a whole winter looking for.

"I don't know," I said.

It wasn't a lie. Not technically.

---

They asked Ryker a few more questions. He answered in short, broken sentences, the kind you give when you've already said too much and you're trying to stop the bleeding. I sat with my hands folded and my face arranged and watched him come apart in increments, and I felt—

I didn't know what I felt. Something that wasn't grief and wasn't anger and wasn't quite pity either. Something colder. Something that had been sitting in my chest since I'd watched Elodie's face on that seventeen-second video, looking straight into the camera like she'd known someone else would be watching eventually.

The detectives stood to leave twenty minutes later. Ryker hadn't moved from the armchair. His hands hung between his knees, empty.

I walked Reyes to the door. Her partner was already in the hall, already on his phone. She turned back once, and her voice dropped to something that didn't carry.

"Ms. Cross." Not *Willow.* Not *Harper.* She'd already corrected herself. She was precise, this woman. "If you happen to remember anything — about belongings Ms. Marchand may have left for your fiancé — you can reach me directly."

She held out a card. Small, white, a number printed in plain black type.

I took it.

"Of course," I said.

She held my gaze for one beat longer than necessary. Then she was gone, her footsteps even and unhurried down the hall.

I closed the door.

I stood with my back against it, the card between two fingers, and stared at the room — the sofa with its flattened cushions where the detectives had sat, the streak of gray light coming in through the window, Ryker still folded into the armchair like something that had been wrung out and left to dry.

She knew about the box.

Reyes already knew about the box, and she'd told me — not him — and she'd looked at me the way you look at someone when you're deciding whether they're an asset or a liability.

I pressed the card flat against my palm and felt the edges of it, sharp and clean.

I needed to find that box tonight. Before Ryker did. Before Reyes did. Before whoever M was decided Friday had already come and gone.