The divorced wife

chapter 14

Chapter 14

NAOMI POV

Julian didn't wait for me to argue. He had the driver's door open and his hand on my back, pushing me toward the passenger side before I'd even processed what I was looking at.

"Get in."

I got in.

He slid behind the wheel, locked the doors the second his door shut, and sat there for a second with both hands on the wheel, not starting the car, scanning the garage through the windshield.

"Do you see anyone," I asked.

"No." He said it through his teeth. "That's the problem."

He pulled out slow, no screeching tires, nothing that would draw attention, which told me more about how scared he actually was than if he'd floored it. We took the ramp down instead of straight out to the street, and at the gate he paused just long enough to look both directions before turning left instead of the way we usually went.

"You're not taking the main road," I said.

"The text said not to." His jaw was tight. "I don't know who's giving us directions right now, but until I have a better plan, I'm following them."

We drove in silence for a few minutes, streetlights sliding across the windshield, both of us checking mirrors more than the road ahead. My phone stayed silent. I kept checking it anyway.

"Talk to me," Julian said finally, eyes still moving between the mirrors and the road. "Not everything. I know you're not ready for everything. But something. Who is this person. Why do they know things about my own house before I do."

"I don't know who they are. I've never gotten a name, never gotten a voice, nothing but texts." I turned the phone over in my hands, screen dark, like looking at it long enough might make it explain itself. "They warned me the first time at the storage unit, weeks ago. Then nothing for almost two weeks. Now twice in one hour."

"Someone inside the house."

"Maybe. Or someone watching it from outside closely enough that it doesn't matter."

He was quiet for a block, working something over. "Carla."

"I thought that too, at first. But Carla's gone. She was let go before any of this happened tonight."

"Unless she's still watching from wherever she landed. She worked in that house thirty years, Naomi. People like that don't just stop caring what happens in it."

I hadn't thought of that, and the possibility settled somewhere uncomfortable in my chest that a woman who'd lost her job for trying to protect me might still be putting herself at risk to keep doing it.

"Even if it's her," I said, "it doesn't explain how she'd know about a car in a parking garage two blocks from the merger office. That's not house information. That's someone physically near us."

Julian's hands tightened on the wheel.

We reached the address I had for Harmon twenty minutes later, a modest street of narrow row houses, nothing that matched the merger world we'd just left behind. Julian parked half a block down, in shadow, and killed the engine.

"This is her house?"

"This is the address Marcus gave me. I don't know if she still lives here."

"It's almost ten at night."

"I know."

He looked at me. "You want to just knock."

"I want to talk to someone who might understand what's happening to us before it happens all the way. I don't have time to wait for a better hour."

Something in his face shifted, not quite approval, something closer to resignation, the look of a man realizing arguing wasn't going to slow me down and deciding to walk beside me instead of behind me.

"Then we knock together," he said.

We crossed the street quickly, close, both of us glancing back the way we'd come out of habit now. The porch light was on. I knocked twice, soft, the kind of knock that doesn't wake a whole street.

The door opened on a chain first, a sliver of a woman's face in the gap, maybe fifty, sharp-eyed, wary in the specific way people get when they've learned wariness the hard way.

"We're not selling anything," I said quickly. "I'm not here about anything like that. My name is Naomi. My father owned Reyes Logistics."

The eyes on the other side of the chain didn't move for a second. Then they moved to Julian, and narrowed.

"Who's he."

"My husband. Julian Voss."

The chain didn't come off. If anything, the door pulled an inch tighter.

"Voss," she repeated, flat, like the word itself had a taste to it. "You brought a Voss to my door."

"He didn't know," I said, fast, before she could shut it entirely. "About any of it. Not the first time, and not now. He's finding out the same night I am."

The woman studied Julian for a long, silent moment, the porch light throwing hard shadows across her face. Whatever she saw, it didn't fully satisfy her, but it kept the door from closing.

"My father was Robert Harmon," she said. "Harmon Shipping. You've heard of it?"

"An auditor told me about it. Marcus Cole."

Something in her expression cracked open at that name not warmth, exactly, but recognition, the look of someone hearing a name they'd been carrying alone for a long time.

"Marcus," she said quietly. "He still looking."

"He's still looking."

She was quiet for a moment, weighing something behind the chain. Then, slowly, she slid it free and opened the door wider, though she didn't step back to invite us in, not yet.

"Nine years," she said. "Nine years, and nobody's ever come to my door asking about my father's company except that one man, twice, years apart. Now his wife shows up." Her eyes cut to Julian again, harder this time. "You understand what it means, that I'm even talking to you right now."

"I think I'm starting to," Julian said quietly, and I heard something in his voice I hadn't heard before not defensiveness, not the careful diplomacy I was used to from him at his father's table. Something rawer.

She studied him a moment longer, then looked back at me.

"Your father's company," she said. "Did it fail quiet, or did it fail loud?"

"Quiet," I said. "Nobody left to explain why."

She nodded slowly, like I'd given the right answer to a test she hadn't told me I was taking.

"Mine failed loud," she said. "Because my father wouldn't go quiet. He fought it in the courts for two years before it took everything he had left to fight with." She stepped back from the door at last, just enough to let us understand we were being allowed in. "That's probably why I'm still alive to answer this door."

The words landed between us like something dropped from a height, and I felt Julian go still beside me, the full weight of what she'd just said settling into the small space of that doorway.

"Come in," she said. "Quickly. And don't stand under my porch light a second longer than you have to. If a Voss followed you here, I'd rather not be the one who let him see exactly who opened this door."