Daniel called at six in the morning, eleven days after the conversation in Margaret's study, his voice carrying the particular flat urgency of a man who had been awake all night and wasn't going to waste time on preamble. "I found her. A motel outside Hudson, paying cash under a name that isn't hers or Isabella's either, which took some work to trace. She's alone. She's safe, as far as I can tell from watching the place for the last two hours. I didn't approach — I thought you'd want to be the one to do that, or Wren would."
Wren was already pulling on yesterday's clothes by the time Sebastian relayed the address, the particular scramble of a person who had spent six weeks braced for exactly this call and still hadn't fully prepared herself for the reality of it arriving. Sebastian drove
