UNBROKEN

A Problem For Both Of You

The responding officer was young, thorough, and visibly out of his depth the moment Wren tried to explain why a photograph left on her kitchen counter mattered more than the fact that nothing appeared to be stolen. Officer Delgado took notes, photographed the scene, bagged the picture as evidence with the same careful detachment he’d probably bring to a routine break-in, and Wren watched him do it with a growing, sinking certainty that none of the paperwork in front of him would translate into anything resembling real protection.

“No forced entry,” Delgado said, closing his notebook. “Whoever got in either had a key or picked the lock clean, which — for the record — isn’t nothing, but it’s also not something I can chase down tonight. I’ll file the report, flag it for follow-up, and I’d recommend changing your locks first thing tomorrow.”

“That’s it?” Marisol’s voice cracked with disbelief. “Someone broke into her house and left a threat with her name on it, and the plan is a follow-up report?”

“Ma’am, without a name, a face, or a vehicle, there’s not a lot I can do tonight beyond documenting what happened. If Ms.—” he glanced at his notes, “—if Wren has any information about who might be responsible, that would help enormously.”

Wren felt Cole go very still beside her, the two of them exchanging a glance loaded with everything they weren’t saying — the Halloway name, Reyes, the sedan, Dez’s stalled report, an entire architecture of danger that felt, somehow, both too enormous and too flimsy to hand over to a twenty-six-year-old officer with a notepad in a town that had never had to think seriously about organized threats before tonight.

“I have some information,” Wren said carefully. “But it involves people with resources who are very good at making sure nothing sticks to them. I’d rather talk it through properly, tomorrow, with someone higher up than a first responder at midnight.”

Delgado studied her for a moment, something in his expression suggesting he’d heard more in that careful non-answer than she’d meant to give away, but he nodded, professional enough not to push. “I’ll have Detective Ruiz reach out in the morning. She handles anything that crosses jurisdictional lines. In the meantime—” he glanced toward the front door, now closed and locked but suddenly feeling like the flimsiest barrier in the world, “—I wouldn’t recommend staying here tonight.”

That, at least, was advice Wren had no intention of ignoring.

Once the cruiser pulled away, the three of them stood in the driveway in a silence that felt too big for the small, quiet street around them. Marisol was the first to speak, her earlier fear hardening into something more useful.

“You’re coming to my place. Both of you,” she added, glancing at Cole with an appraising look that suggested she’d fully absorbed, at some point in the last hour, that he was now a fixture in this rather than a stranger passing through it. “I have a guest room and a couch, and I’m not asking either of you to argue with me about it tonight.”

“Marisol, if they’re willing to break into my house, I’m not dragging that risk to your doorstep.”

“They already know I’m your friend, Wren. I’m in the flower shop’s call logs, remember? If they wanted to find me, they didn’t need you to lead them there.” Marisol’s jaw was set in a way that Wren recognized now as immovable. “I would rather have you where I can see you than lying awake wondering if you’re safe somewhere I can’t reach.”

Wren looked to Cole, half expecting him to argue the logistics, but he was watching her with an expression that suggested he’d already worked through the calculation and landed somewhere similar. “She’s not wrong about the exposure. And for what it’s worth,” he added, quieter, “the note wasn’t just about you tonight. It said both of you. Whoever left it already knows I’m involved. Which means staying at the motel on Harbor Road under my own name is probably not the safest plan I could come up with either.”

“So we’re all just supposed to hide at Marisol’s flower shop apartment like that solves anything.”

“It solves tonight,” Cole said. “Tomorrow we figure out the rest. Tonight, we just need everyone somewhere with locked doors and more than one set of eyes.”

It wasn’t a plan so much as a temporary truce with the chaos, but Wren was too exhausted, too hollowed out by the last four hours, to argue with the logic of it. She followed Marisol’s car in Cole’s truck, since her own house no longer felt like a place she trusted to retrieve so much as a single change of clothes from, and the short drive passed in a silence that felt different from the tense quiet of earlier — heavier, but somehow less frightening, the particular exhaustion that settles in after adrenaline has nowhere left to go.

“Can I ask you something,” Cole said finally, eyes on the road.

“Depends what it is.”

“That note. I know you’re not alone anymore. That’s not just about tonight, is it. That’s about the last eight months. Someone’s been watching long enough to know you built something here — the coffee shop, Marisol, all of it.”

Wren’s throat tightened. “Yes.”

“Then whoever’s doing this isn’t just trying to find you,” Cole said slowly, working through it as he spoke. “They’re trying to make sure that whatever you built here doesn’t survive them finding you. That’s not the same threat. That’s worse.”

Wren stared out the window at the dark shapes of Ashford Bay sliding past — the closed coffee shop, the park with its oak trees, the pier where Cole’s shop sat dark and empty three streets from where they were headed — and felt, for the first time since the photograph had landed on Dez’s workbench three hours away and a lifetime ago, the particular fury that comes after fear has finally run its course.

“Then we don’t let them,” she said.

Cole glanced at her, something in his expression shifting — not surprise, exactly, but a kind of recalibration, like he was seeing a different version of her snap into focus, one that had nothing to do with the woman running from a photograph and everything to do with the woman who’d once, apparently, gotten five years of freedom out of nothing but nerve and timing.

Neither of them noticed the second black sedan, parked two blocks from Marisol’s shop, its driver already lifting a phone to relay their new location to someone who had been waiting, very patiently, for exactly this kind of mistake.

A night at Marisol’s, and the conversation Wren isn’t ready for but can’t avoid any longer: who Reyes actually reports to, and how far Halloway is willing to go.