UNBROKEN

Cypress Lane

“Say that again,” Wren said, though she’d heard it perfectly well the first time. Some part of her simply needed the extra half-second before the information finished landing.

“The flower shop got two calls this week from this exact number.” Marisol turned the phone so the screen faced them both, the message still glowing there like an accusation. “Both times, whoever it was asked if we delivered to a rental on Cypress Lane. I told them yes, obviously, we deliver anywhere in town, and I didn’t think a single thing about it because why would I. People rent short-term places on Cypress Lane all the time — it’s half vacation rentals.”

“Which one.” Wren’s voice had gone flat, stripped of the tremor it might have carried five minutes ago. Whatever fear she’d felt reading the text had condensed, in the space of Marisol’s revelation, into something colder and more useful. “Which house.”

“I didn’t ask for an address, I just confirmed the street. Wren, I’m sorry, I had no reason to—”

“You couldn’t have known.” Wren cut her off gently, because it was true, and because there wasn’t time to spend on blame that belonged, if it belonged anywhere, entirely somewhere else. “I need to see the call log. Exact dates, exact times.”

Marisol was already pulling out her own phone, scrolling with the particular efficiency of someone glad to have a concrete task in the middle of a night that had stopped making sense. “Tuesday. Then again yesterday, late afternoon. Both times from this number.” She looked up, and there was something steady in her expression now, the panic she’d have been entitled to replaced by a grim, determined focus that Wren recognized because she’d worn it herself for five years. “They’ve been here at least since Tuesday. Watching. That’s — Wren, that’s four days before tonight.”

Four days. Four days of someone sitting on a rental four blocks from her house, watching the rhythm of her ordinary life — the coffee shop, the community center, the bench in the park where the oak trees dropped their leaves — while she’d walked through all of it believing, right up until an hour ago, that she’d finally outrun everything that used to own her. The cruelty of it, the patience of it, made something in her chest go very cold and very still.

“I have to go home,” Wren said. “I have to see if anything’s been moved, if anyone’s been inside—”

“You are not going home alone.” Marisol’s voice left no room for negotiation. “I’m coming with you, and before you tell me it’s too dangerous, I’d like to point out that I already know your husband’s name is apparently powerful enough to hire people who watch flower shop call logs like it’s a competitive sport, so I think we’re past the point where ‘it’s dangerous’ is a persuasive argument for leaving me behind.”

Despite everything, despite the cold dread pooling in her stomach, Wren felt a small, fierce warmth flicker through her — the particular gratitude of being fought for by someone who had every reasonable excuse to simply be afraid and step back instead.

“Okay,” she said. “But we call Cole first.”

The words surprised her even as she said them, and she watched Marisol’s eyebrows lift a fraction, though her friend was gracious enough not to comment on the significance of Wren volunteering to involve him rather than being talked into it. Wren pulled the folded scrap of paper from her clutch, Cole’s number scrawled in blunt pencil, and dialed before she could second-guess it.

He picked up on the second ring. “Wren.”

“I need you to come to my house. Not because I trust you,” she added quickly, before he could read more into it than she meant, “but because you’re the only person in this town who already knows what we’re dealing with, and I don’t have time to explain it to anyone else from scratch tonight.”

“Address?”

She gave it to him, and something in his immediate, unhesitating “I’m on my way” — no questions, no demands for more information first — settled a fraction of the chaos in her chest, though she refused to examine too closely why that was.

The drive to her house took eleven minutes that felt like eleven hours, Marisol gripping the wheel with white knuckles while Wren scanned every parked car they passed for a dark sedan, every lit window for a silhouette that didn’t belong. Ashford Bay, which had felt like the safest place in the world eight months ago, now felt like a stage set she’d been performing on without realizing anyone was watching from the wings.

Her house came into view — small, single-story, the porch light she always left on for herself glowing warm and steady exactly where she’d left it — and for one breath, one single suspended breath, everything looked entirely, blessedly normal.

Then Marisol’s headlights swept across the front door, and Wren’s whole body went cold.

The door, which she was absolutely certain she’d locked before leaving for the gallery, stood open by exactly three inches — just wide enough for the dark hallway beyond to show as a thin, silent seam of black against the porch light’s glow.

what’s waiting inside the house, and can Cole arrive in time.