The reminder from his monitor won’t leave my head.
HART RISK SOLUTIONS – DOWNTOWN – 10:00 A.M.
The words burn behind my eyelids while I lie awake, listening to the cul-de-sac settle. Fog presses low over Maple Hollow; headlights smear along the street and across my bedroom window in slow, watery strokes. Every time a car passes, my mind supplies an image of Liam behind the wheel, driving straight toward that calendar entry.
By eight-thirty, I’m done pretending I can work. My laptop sits open on a blank document, cursor winking in accusation. I swap pajama pants for jeans, pull on a sweater that still smells faintly like hospital detergent from visiting Tessa, and grab my keys.
Downstairs, the house holds its usual morning mix of coffee grounds, dust, and old grief. A notification chirps from my phone on the table, that bright mechanical chime parents in Maple Hollow use to announce angelversaries and curated mourning posts. I flip it face-down.
“I’m not posting,” I tell the phone. “I’m surveilling.”
Saying it out loud steadies my hands.
I park my car at the end of the driveway, angled so I have a clear view of Liam’s. The drizzle hasn’t committed to full rain yet; it beads on the windshield, tiny lenses distorting the neat line of houses. My wipers squeak on the dry glass when I test them, nails-on-chalkboard loud in the quiet street.
At nine-oh-five, Liam’s garage yawns open.
His sedan rolls out, dark paint slick with moisture. He pauses to tap at his dashboard—setting navigation, probably—and for a second I picture the route glowing on his screen, a straight vein from this manicured bowl of an HOA to whatever downtown artery feeds Hart Risk Solutions.
My pulse jumps. Hunter’s thrill, sharp and clean, cuts through the murk of the last few days.
“I shouldn’t do this,” I tell the steering wheel.
I shift into drive anyway.
I give him two car lengths on the way out of Maple Hollow. The slope down toward the main road is slick with mist; the familiar smell of rain and pine drifts through the vents. We pass the trimmed lawns the HOA obsesses over and the dark windows that hide whispered fights no one will bring up at meetings.
At the stop sign, he turns left. I follow.
By the time we hit the freeway on-ramp, drizzle thickens into real rain, the kind that tattoos the windshield in a thousand temporary circles before the wipers clear them away. The distant hum of traffic grows into a roar around us. I tuck in behind a delivery truck, using its bulk to hide my car from Liam’s rearview mirror.
Micro-hook: if he spends his life watching, how long before he feels me watching him?
He drives predictably—signal, merge, steady speed. No weaving, no sudden lane changes, no paranoid checking of blind spots. To anyone else, he looks like a man heading to a boring mid-morning meeting.
I watch his taillights instead of the road signs. Red dots through the spray, always just ahead.
We peel off into downtown forty minutes later, the skyline rising in glassy slabs. Wet concrete reflects traffic lights and umbrellas, turning every surface into a layered image. The GPS on my phone murmurs directions I already know, its voice slicing through the white noise of tires on wet streets.
“Mute,” I say, and jab the screen. The sudden silence buzzes.
Liam signals toward an underground parking entrance beside a sleek glass tower. HART RISK SOLUTIONS appears on a brushed metal plaque near the ramp, along with a handful of other firm names, all clean fonts and corporate blandness.
My stomach flips.
I keep going straight, circling the block once with my fingers biting into the steering wheel, then duck into a public garage across the street. The ticket spits out with a mechanical thunk; the gate lifts. The smell down here is oil and damp concrete, thick in the air.
I find a spot by the exit ramp and kill the engine. For a moment, I just sit there, breath loud in the confined space.
“You’re tailing a man you kissed last night,” I say to the dashboard. “Great life choices.”
The echo in the car doesn’t disagree.
From the third level of the garage, I have a partial view of the office tower through the concrete gaps. Rain veils the street below, softening edges, but the building’s lobby glows bright through two-story glass panes, a lit aquarium full of people in business casual.
Liam exits the underground ramp and walks toward the revolving doors with his shoulders slightly hunched against the drizzle. No briefcase; just a dark jacket over his shirt, hands in his pockets. He looks smaller without the monitors behind him, just another man swallowed by downtown.
I slide out of my car, pull up my hood, and head down the stairs, phone in my pocket like a secret weapon.
The rain feels colder down at street level, needling my cheeks. Every passing bus slings a spray of dirty water into the gutter. The air smells like exhaust layered over wet stone, the clean maple-and-pine of home replaced by something harder, more metallic.
I stop across from the building, tucked beside a coffee cart’s red umbrella. Steam rises from the barista’s espresso machine, turning the air into a caffeinated cloud.
“You in line?” the barista asks.
“Not yet,” I say. “I’m waiting for someone.”
The lobby glass is pristine, no posters, no stickers—just reflections. Cars slide across its surface, ghost-versions of the ones behind me. Inside, security desks sit like white islands. People badge in, doors click, elevator doors glide shut.
There. Liam.
He steps up to the turnstiles and pulls a badge from his pocket. The sight hits like a physical shove. Not a visitor sticker, not a temporary printed pass. A badge.
“You work here,” I breathe.
The scanner flashes green. He pushes through.
Hunter’s thrill drains out of my limbs, replaced by something colder.
I lift my phone and open the camera.
Through the glass, he approaches a seating area where an elegant woman in a dark suit stands to greet him. Her posture telegraphs ease and authority—feet planted, shoulders back, one hand holding a slim leather folio.
Her hair is pulled into a smooth chignon. Pearl studs glow at her ears. Even at this distance, I can tell the suit fits like it was tailored to her bones.
Liam offers his hand. She takes it, her smile sharp and controlled. They exchange a few sentences I can’t hear, mouths moving in rhythm, and then she gestures toward a quieter corner near a plant wall. They walk side by side, heads angled toward each other, bodies aligned.
I snap the first photo.
The camera shutter clicks, soft but definite. I adjust my angle, using the reflection of a passing umbrella to mask my raised phone in the glass, then take another shot. I zoom in on their faces, their hands, that damned badge clipped to Liam’s belt.
“Smile for me,” I whisper.
They don’t. Good. I don’t want smiles. I want evidence.
Micro-hook: if they can turn my grief into a PR talking point, I can turn this lobby into a crime scene for my own case file.
A gust of wind blows drizzle under the coffee cart’s umbrella; cold beads race down my neck. Somewhere behind me, a horn honks, sharp and impatient. My phone vibrates with a notification from the neighborhood Facebook group; I ignore it and keep shooting.
The woman opens the folio and slides a document toward Liam on the low table. He leans over it, resting his forearms on his thighs, studying whatever sits on that paper with the same intensity he used on my son’s crash photos.
He nods once, then starts talking, his hands moving in precise little slashes. She watches him closely, expression unreadable behind the glass. Now and then she jots a note, pen flashing.
I imagine the conversation: risk assessments, exposure, narrative control. Terms that live in the same universe as guardrail specs and crash reports.
The barista clears his throat beside me. “Still not getting that coffee?”
“Change of plans,” I say.
I back away, keeping my phone angled for one last shot through the rain-smeared glass. Liam laughs at something the woman says, his shoulders relaxing, his head tipping forward in a gesture of familiarity I’ve never seen him use with anyone on our street.
My thumb presses the button again.
Click.
I turn and walk back toward the garage before I have to watch him follow her into an elevator.
Back home, Maple Hollow feels smaller than ever.
The fog has crept in deeper over the cul-de-sac, blurring edges. Headlights drag across my living room window in pale streaks as neighbors return from Costco runs and school drop-offs. Somewhere down the slope, the freeway hums, indifferent.
I drop my keys in the bowl by the door, toe off my shoes, and head straight for my laptop. My fingers leave damp marks on the trackpad when I flip it open.
I transfer the photos from my phone, the progress bar crawling across the screen. Each thumbnail pops up like a tiny confession: Liam at the badge scanner, Liam shaking hands, Liam leaning over documents beside the woman in the perfect suit.
I open the sharpest image, crop in on her face. The overhead lobby lights flatten her features a little, but the bones are there: strong jaw, high cheekbones, controlled smile, eyes that look like they missed nothing.
“Who are you?” I ask the screen.
I drag the file into a reverse image search tab.
The wheel spins for a few endless seconds. I tap my fingers on the table to bleed off the adrenaline, hearing the phantom buzz of security cameras and the echo of that shutter click in my head.
Results load.
Her face appears in crisp, well-lit glory on a corporate website. Same hair, same jaw, but softer lighting, slightly warmer lipstick. A professional headshot crafted in a conference room with a rented plant.
EVELYN HART, PARTNER – LITIGATION / RISK SOLUTIONS.
Beneath her name, a bland biography unspools: years of experience representing major infrastructure and manufacturing clients, expertise in complex liability cases, a line about her commitment to “balancing safety, innovation, and shareholder value.”
My eyes snag on one line halfway down.
Lead counsel, national defense team for Meridian Barriers & Infrastructure.
Meridian. The name from the technical sheets in the anonymous folder. The company stamped on the tiny metal plate by the smashed guardrail on Old Willow Road.
I read the sentence again, slower, tasting every word like poison.
Lead counsel for Meridian Barriers & Infrastructure.
“Of course you are,” I whisper.
Micro-hook: if he once exposed a guardrail scandal, what kind of story pays enough to put him on the opposite side of the table?
I scroll down. There’s a quote from her about “narratives around risk” and “helping clients tell their story clearly in the face of tragedy.” The word narrative lands like a slap.
I imagine her talking about Caleb’s crash in a conference room, calling it an isolated incident, a tragic reminder that personal responsibility matters. I picture a slide behind her with graphs and settlements and my son’s face cropped out of the frame.
My mouth goes dry.
I click to another tab and pull up the photos again. In one, Liam leans in, listening. In another, he’s talking, and Evelyn Hart’s smile curves in a way that reads less like warmth and more like satisfaction.
“You told me you’re not them,” I say to his frozen image. “You are currently inside their lobby with their lawyer.”
The house creaks around me. A notification pings on my phone—another memorial hashtag from a Maple Hollow parent, probably—but the sound only underscores the silence pressing in.
My mind starts arranging scenes, not on the page but in the future.
Scene: I confront Liam with these photos, demand an explanation. He claims infiltration, says he’s inside their walls to blow them up. Scene: he turns this around, calls my tailing obsessive, unstable, exactly the label the neighborhood whispers. Scene: Evelyn Hart in a deposition using my therapy records and late-night surveillance habits to paint me as unreliable.
Every secret I handed him in the glow of his monitors turns into a file he could slide across a table in that lobby.
The thought chills my skin.
I save the photos to three separate folders—desktop, external drive, encrypted cloud account—and then print one copy, watching the paper emerge warm and smelling faintly of toner. The woman’s face locks into physical form in my hands, no longer pixels.
I tape the printout to the corkboard over my desk, right next to my mock-up of the crash site and the EMDR notes Dr. Navarro made me write. Another piece of glass, framed and hung, except this time I’m the one holding the hammer.
Under the photo, I write her name in black marker.
EVELYN HART – MERIDIAN.
Then, in smaller letters under that, I add:
LIAM’S CLIENT?
My hand doesn’t shake this time.
I sit back in my chair and stare at the two names together, side by side. The kiss from last night flickers through my memory, disorienting in its heat. I picture his hand on my jaw, then move that hand in my mind, sliding a folder across a glass conference table instead.
“If you’re feeding them my story,” I tell his photocopied smile, “I’ll write a version you can’t control.”
The fog thickens outside. Headlights smear across my front window, turning my reflection into a layered ghost over the cul-de-sac. In that composite image, I see myself, Evelyn, and Liam’s shadow between us, all framed by glass.
One question rises above the rest, sharp and cold and clean.
When I confront him with the proof that he walks under the same logo as the company that wrapped my son’s car around a guardrail, will he try to rewrite this, too—turning my betrayal into just another unreliable chapter in a story he thinks he owns?