Emerie's hands were steady as she wrote.
Not a letter. Not quite.
She used pencil stubs broken from an old drafting kit. She wrote small, using shorthand she'd invented in college—half letters, coded dates, inverted strokes.
Each line started with a name.
Each name matched a Macadam shell company.
Each date—an invoice or transaction she'd glimpsed on Antony's tablet during their last design review.
She wrote on scraps of napkins, paper margins, fabric tags.
Then carefully tore out a page from the back of her sketchbook, folded the code inside, and tucked it into the lining of a laundry bag.
A maid would pick it up in the morning.
And maybe, just maybe, the world would pick her up again too.
---
**Later that day.**
Antony sat in the villa study, alone, pen hovering over cream-co
