UNBROKEN

The Black Sedan

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The gallery noise behind them felt suddenly very far away — the clink of glasses, Priya’s bright, nervous laugh as someone praised her work, the whole warm ordinary world of a Saturday night continuing on obliviously while Wren stood frozen at the window, staring at a car that had no business being parked across the street with its lights off.

“That could be nothing,” Cole said, though his voice had gone low and careful, a man choosing his words the way you’d choose footing on ice. “Ashford Bay’s not exactly short on parking problems on a Saturday.”

“Cars parked for parking problems have their lights off because they’re off, not because someone’s trying not to be noticed.” Wren’s mind was already running through options, fast and cold, the old muscle memory taking over the way it always did when the ground shifted under her — not panic, never panic, panic got people caught. Just assessment. Exits. Distances. Who she could and couldn’t afford to involve. “I need to get Marisol away from the windows without her asking why.”

“You want me to go check the car?”

“I want you to not do anything that makes it obvious we’ve noticed it.” She glanced at him, sharp, assessing him now the same way she’d have assessed the sedan — a variable she hadn’t accounted for a half hour ago and now had no choice but to factor in. “Which, for the record, is still an open question. I don’t know you. I don’t know if that’s your car’s backup, or if you’re the reason it’s here at all.”

Something flickered across Cole’s face — not offense exactly, more like the particular weariness of a man who’d expected exactly this reaction and had already decided he wasn’t going to waste time being hurt by it. “Fair,” he said simply. “You don’t have to trust me. But you should probably still get your friend away from the glass.”

He was right, and hating that he was right didn’t change the fact of it. Wren turned back into the gallery, plastering something that might pass for a normal smile over the cold calculation running underneath it, and found Marisol by the drinks table, mid-story, gesturing with a plastic cup of red wine that was one enthusiastic gesture away from becoming a stain on someone’s jacket.

“Hey,” Wren said, keeping her voice light, “I need to borrow you for a sec. Priya wants help with something in the back.”

Marisol blinked, caught off guard by the interruption but reading, somewhere under the wine and the party chatter, that something in Wren’s face wasn’t quite matching her tone. She excused herself smoothly enough, followed Wren toward the back hallway near the restrooms, out of sightline from the front windows, and the second they were out of earshot her expression sharpened into something far more serious.

“What’s going on.”

“I’m not sure yet.” Wren kept her voice low, glancing once toward the front of the gallery where Cole had positioned himself near the door — not obviously watching the street, but not entirely not watching it either, angled just enough to keep the sedan in his peripheral vision. “There’s a car outside I don’t like the look of. I need you to stay back here for a few minutes.”

“A car you don’t — Wren, what does that mean? Whose car?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s the problem.” Wren pressed her palms flat against her thighs, a habit from years ago, grounding herself in something physical when everything else felt like it was sliding sideways. “I need you to trust me on this without asking a lot of questions I don’t have good answers to right now.”

Marisol’s eyes went wide, then narrowed, then did something complicated that suggested she was recalculating an entire friendship in real time — every deflected question, every unexplained flinch at a ringing bell, every refusal to fully unpack a box, all of it clicking into a shape she’d apparently been too polite, or too kind, to push on before now.

“Okay,” Marisol said, quiet and steady in a way that made something in Wren’s chest ache with gratitude she didn’t have time to feel properly. “Okay. I’m not going anywhere. Is Cole part of the problem or part of the solution?”

“I genuinely don’t know yet.”

“Great. Extremely reassuring. Love that for both of us.” But Marisol didn’t move, didn’t push toward the front of the gallery, just planted herself against the hallway wall with her arms crossed like she intended to hold that position through sheer stubbornness alone, and Wren felt a fierce, unexpected rush of love for her — for this whole ridiculous, fragile, eight-month-old life, for a friend who asked exactly one clarifying question and then simply stayed.

When Wren made her way back toward the front of the gallery, Cole was no longer standing near the door.

Her stomach dropped before her mind caught up to why. She scanned the room once, twice, a rising, familiar cold spreading through her chest — and then she saw him, outside, across the street, standing directly beside the driver’s side window of the black sedan, leaning down to speak to whoever was inside like the two of them were old friends catching up.

End of chapter five.