UNBROKEN

Getting Ahead Of It

Wren stared at the handwriting until the letters stopped making sense as words and became instead a shape she remembered too well — the particular slant of his capital letters, the way he pressed hard enough on the downstrokes to leave faint grooves in the card stock. Julian had always written like a man who expected the paper itself to obey him.

“Wren.” Marisol’s voice came from somewhere far away. “Wren, say something.”

“I’m fine.” The words came out automatic, the same reflexive lie she’d told a hundred doctors and neighbors and, once, a police officer standing in her old kitchen with a clipboard he never quite filled out. She caught herself the second it left her mouth. “I’m not fine. But I’m not falling apart either. There’s a difference, and I need both of you to understand which one this is, because I need you thinking clearly with me, not managing me.”

Cole studied her for a long moment, something in his expression shifting from concern into a kind of careful respect. “Okay. Then tell us what ‘coming himself’ means, in practical terms. You know him. We don’t.”

Wren pulled her knees up onto the couch cushion, wrapping her arms around them, an old posture from years of making herself smaller in rooms where bigger felt dangerous. She made herself unfold it, deliberately, a small rebellion against a habit she was tired of carrying. “Julian doesn’t do his own dirty work. That’s the whole point of Reyes, of the money, of the lawyers — he insulates himself from consequences by never being the one holding anything incriminating. If he’s coming himself, that’s not a security decision. That’s personal.”

“Personal how,” Marisol asked.

“He wants to see my face when he finds me.” Wren’s voice had gone quiet, but steady, the particular steadiness of someone describing a familiar horror rather than discovering a new one. “He wants to know I’m afraid. That was always the point, even in the marriage — not the money, not even really the control, though he wanted that too. He wanted to watch me understand that I couldn’t win. If he’s coming himself, it’s because a note left by a stranger on the counter isn’t satisfying enough for him anymore. He wants the satisfaction in person.”

Cole’s jaw tightened, and for a moment the careful composure he’d maintained all night cracked into something harder, something closer to fury than she’d seen from him yet. “That’s not a threat assessment. That’s a man planning an event.”

“Yes.” Wren met his eyes. “Which means the timeline just changed. Reyes and whoever left that card weren’t here to grab me tonight — they were here to confirm, to rattle, to lay groundwork. If Julian’s actually planning to come himself, he’ll want it to matter. He’ll want an audience, or at least the illusion of privacy long enough to say whatever he’s rehearsed. That buys us a little time. Probably not much.”

Marisol had gone very still, her earlier fear compressed into something colder and sharper. “How much time are we talking.”

“I don’t know. Days, maybe. A week if we’re lucky and he’s still tying up whatever business keeps a shipping empire running while he plans a trip to a town he’s never had a reason to visit before.” Wren rubbed her palms against her jeans, an old nervous habit she thought she’d broken years ago. “But I don’t want to sit here waiting to find out which end of that range we’re on.”

“So what do we do,” Cole said. “Because I’ll be honest, my expertise runs to boat hulls and a decade of my uncle’s paranoid habits rubbing off on me. I don’t have a playbook for this.”

“You have more than you think,” Wren said, surprising herself with the observation. “You checked a perimeter tonight like you’d done it before. You clocked Reyes’s tell before I did. That’s not nothing.”

“That’s Dez’s training, not mine. He used to drag me along on surveillance jobs when I was a teenager, mostly to keep me out of trouble. I never thought any of it would actually matter.”

“It matters now.” Wren pulled her phone from her clutch, the screen still showing the unread messages she hadn’t had the composure to address yet, and set it face-down on the coffee table like the physical act of hiding it might quiet the noise in her head. “Here’s what I think we do. First — Detective Ruiz, tomorrow, with everything. Not the sanitized version I gave Delgado tonight. The real version, the Halloway name, all of it. If there’s any chance of getting real protection instead of a follow-up report, it starts with someone taking this seriously at a level above patrol.”

“They won’t necessarily believe you,” Marisol said gently. “Not without evidence. Powerful families like that are good at looking clean on paper.”

“I know. Which is why we’re not putting all our weight on the police being the answer.” Wren looked at Cole. “Dez has records from the original job — the one where they hired him to find me. Does he still have any of that? Emails, invoices, anything showing they were paying for surveillance on a private citizen who’d committed no crime?”

“Probably. Dez doesn’t throw anything away — professional habit, in case a client ever tries to stiff him.” Cole was already reaching for his phone. “I can call him right now.”

“Do it. If we can show a pattern — paid surveillance, a break-in, a threatening note with Julian’s company card attached to it — that’s not just my word against a rich man’s lawyers anymore. That’s documentation.”

Marisol leaned forward, some of the color returning to her face now that there was a plan taking shape instead of just fear circling the room. “What about tonight, though. Right now. Are we staying here? Is here even safe, if they already know to look for me?”

Wren considered it, running through the calculation with the same cold clarity she’d used to plan every move of the last five years. “I think tonight, yes. They’ve made their point for tonight — the card, the note, the point was to rattle me, not necessarily to act immediately. If Julian’s planning to come himself, tonight’s escalation was reconnaissance, not the main event. Tomorrow’s a different question. Tomorrow we need somewhere less obvious than the home of my closest friend in a town everyone in Ashford Bay already associates with me.”

“I might have an idea for that,” Cole said slowly, phone still in hand, Dez’s line ringing somewhere on the other end. “Dez’s place, out past the marina. It’s not registered to me, and if Halloway’s people are working off records tied to my name from tonight’s little introduction with Reyes, it wouldn’t be the first place they’d think to look. It’s remote, defensible, and Dez knows how to spot a tail better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“You’d bring me into your uncle’s home. After one night.”

“After tonight,” Cole said, “I think we’re past the point where ‘one night’ is a meaningful measure of anything. You called me before the police. You’re sitting in this room instead of running the second things got bad, which is what I half expected, if I’m honest. I don’t think either of us is operating on normal timelines anymore.”

Wren didn’t have an answer for that, not one that didn’t feel like admitting something she wasn’t ready to name out loud, so she said nothing, and let the silence do the work instead.

Dez picked up on the other end of Cole’s call, his voice tinny and startled through the speaker, clearly roused from sleep, and Cole stepped toward the window to relay the night’s events in low, clipped sentences — the sedan, the break-in, the card, Julian’s handwriting. Wren watched him from across the room, this stranger who’d walked into her ordinary Saturday night carrying a photograph and somehow, in the space of a few catastrophic hours, become the person she’d called before the police.

Her phone buzzed against the table, face-down, and she flinched at the sound before she could stop herself.

Marisol reached for it before Wren could, some protective instinct overriding etiquette entirely, and turned the screen toward the light. Her face went white.

“Wren.” Her voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. “It’s not a text this time.”

“What is it.”

Marisol turned the phone fully around, and Wren’s stomach dropped through the floor of Marisol’s apartment, through the flower shop below it, through every careful layer of safety she’d built over eight fragile months in Ashford Bay.

It was a photograph — timestamped from four minutes ago — of the three of them, sitting in this very living room, framed through the gap in the curtains Wren had forgotten, in the chaos of the night, to fully close.

Someone is close enough to photograph them right now, and the group has to decide, in real time, whether to run or barricade in.