REBECCA’S POV
He called on a Tuesday evening.
I was in the study with Olivia’s folder open on the desk in front of me, cross-referencing her structural timeline with the notes I had been building since the dinner table conversation where Edmund had told me more than he intended to. The work had that quality it sometimes got in the evenings, focused in a way that made the hours disappear, the kind of concentration that only broke when something external interrupted it.
My phone rang.
I looked at the screen.
Daniel Ashworth.
I looked at it for a moment. Then I answered on the second ring, because I had already decided I would, and there was no point in performing hesitation I didn’t actually feel.
“Rebecca,” he said.
Just my name. Not hi or hello or any of the standard openings peop
