Ruiz comes back while the scorched wood on my porch still smells like wet charcoal and chemicals.
Morning light presses thinly through the fog, turning Maple Hollow into a smeared watercolor. Headlights from a passing SUV drag white streaks across the windows, glass catching and bending the light before releasing it back into the gray.
Ruiz stands just inside my doorway, hands on his hips, gaze moving from the blackened step to the foam residue to the note bagged on my console table. He looks like he hasn’t slept. That makes two of us.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” he says. “Whoever did that wanted you scared, not dead. That’s good news and bad.”
“Good,” I say, “because they could have done worse. Bad, because it’s a warning shot, not a one-off.”
He nods once. “Exactly.”
Tessa leans against the wall, arms tightly folded, still in scrub pants and one of my hoodies. “So what now?” she asks. “We keep spraying our porch and hoping they get bored?”
Ruiz exhales, cheeks puffing slightly. He glances past us, across the street, toward Liam’s house. From where I stand I see it too, through the glass: the clean lines of his facade, the blank, reflective windows that hide his monitors. His porch is unmarred, his steps still intact.
“Now,” Ruiz says, “you two don’t sleep here for a while.”
My muscles lock. “No.”
“Mara,” Tessa murmurs.
“No,” I repeat, louder. “I just got this place back from everyone’s stories. I am not abandoning my house because they lit a rag on my steps.”
Ruiz looks at me with that cop-patient expression he uses when witnesses start arguing with physics. “Leaving for a few days isn’t abandonment,” he says. “It’s survival. They escalated. You wrote the essay, you got doxxed, then your front porch burned. We can’t predict the next move. We can reduce your exposure.”
“A hotel,” I say. “Or I go to Mom’s.”
“Your mom lives in Vancouver?” he asks. “Townhouse with ground-floor windows, no cameras, elderly neighbor who falls asleep in front of game shows?”
He has read the file; of course he has. I clench my jaw.
“A hotel by the freeway,” he continues, “puts you in a place where anyone on that forum can walk into the lobby and ask the front desk which room the ‘guardrail lady’ is in. And they will. You know that, right?”
Tessa snorts softly. “He’s not wrong.”
“Then what?” I demand. “You want me in witness protection? A bunker?”
“I want you somewhere with overlapping camera coverage, strong locks, and someone on-site who knows what they’re doing,” Ruiz says. “Which, conveniently, already exists twenty yards away.”
The words hang in the air between us. I follow his look again to Liam’s house. The fog pushes against the big front windows, turning them into milky rectangles. Behind that glass, I know, a wall of monitors waits, watching the cul-de-sac from every angle.
“No,” I say again, but the word is thinner now. “He is part of this. He worked for them. He played me. I kicked him out.”
“He also handed over hours of footage from those cameras for our second-crash review,” Ruiz says. “And he flagged your doxxing to our cyber unit before you called me. Whatever else he is, he’s a resource. In some ways, a better one than we are.”
That admission stings, probably for him too. He keeps his voice flat.
“Let me get this straight,” I say. “The police department—”
“Underfunded police department,” he corrects dryly.
“The underfunded police department,” I echo, “outsources my safety to a private spy with a savior complex and an NDA trail?”
Tessa huffs out a humorless laugh. “You two have a talent for finding the worst words in any sentence.”
Ruiz looks directly at me. “Rowe’s house has full exterior and interior coverage, motion sensors, reinforced locks, off-site backups. Our tech guys joke that his security grid is better than City Hall’s. He already gave me tentative permission to loop you in when this went where I thought it might.”
My head jerks. “He knew you’d ask?”
“He knew someone might,” Ruiz says. “I called him after the patrol report came in.” He sighs. “Listen, Mara. I still don’t fully trust his motives. But I trust what his cameras see. And right now, that matters.”
Micro-hook: For a second, my brain offers an image of me as another file in Liam’s archive, labeled “Live Asset – High Risk.”
Tessa pushes off the wall and steps closer. Her eyes are ringed with dark crescents, skin sallow in the weak light. The faint smell of old smoke clings to her hair.
“I vote we go,” she says. “For a few days. Until this cools down or Ruiz has something concrete. I don’t want to wake up to another alarm and wonder if this time it’s reached the living room.”
“You trust him?” I ask. “Now?”
“I trust locks and cameras and multiple witnesses,” she answers. “And I don’t trust the people who lit our porch. Right now those are the only two columns that matter.”
Ruiz nods. “You don’t have to like him,” he says to me. “You don’t have to talk to him beyond logistics. But I’d rather you hate me from across the street than have to ID you in a morgue.”
That lands like a physical hit. My stomach flips in a slow, unpleasant roll. I stare at the scorched semi-circle on my step, then at the black smudge climbing my blue siding like a new, ugly vine.
“And Caleb?” I ask quietly. “What would he say about me hiding with the man who tailgated him the night he died?”
Ruiz’s face softens around the eyes. “He’d say he’d rather you be alive to make that call,” he says. “You owe no one martyrdom, Mara. Not even him.”
Tessa’s hand finds my forearm, fingers cool, grip steady. “We can bring the photo from the mantle,” she says. “He doesn’t lose us if we cross the street.”
My throat tightens. I look again at Liam’s house, at the cameras like small dark eyes under the eaves. He once used those eyes to watch me without consent. Now the police want them to watch me on purpose.
Truth and illusion tangled, again. My brain wants a clean category—villain, ally, asset, threat. The story keeps refusing.
“Fine,” I say, each consonant heavy. “We pack. But we treat it like a safe house, not a reunion.”
“Good,” Ruiz says. “I’ll walk over with you, explain the arrangement, and get eyes on his setup. Less romantic, more tactical.”
“Just what I always dreamed of,” I mutter.
Packing takes ten minutes. Two overnight bags, my laptop, Caleb’s framed photo, a folder with the most important physical documents. Tessa hauls my fireproof box from the closet, lips pressed flat.
Outside, the air is wet and cold, smelling of rain and pine and the faint petroleum tang from the burned rag that still lingers in my nose. The distant freeway hum underpins everything, a low mechanical tide. Our footsteps sound too loud on the porch; Ruiz’s boots creak on the damp wood.
As we cross the cul-de-sac, I’m acutely aware of how visible we are. Each house has windows facing inward, glass panes that could hide eyes or cameras or just the glow of social media feeds where my essay and my address still circulate.
The HOA would have a field day if they saw the scorch mark I leave behind. They can ticket me for lawn length but nothing in their handbook covers “threatening arson notes.”
Liam’s house looms closer, all clean angles and curated plants in black planters. His glass front door reflects us in triplicate, Ruiz’s broad outline flanked by my smaller frame and Tessa’s stubborn stance.
Ruiz presses the doorbell. A soft, tasteful chime sounds inside.
For a long breath, nothing happens. I hear the distant mechanical ping of a phone notification from somewhere in the neighborhood. Headlights bleed across wet pavement behind us, then vanish.
The locks shift with a quiet electronic click. The door opens.
Liam stands there in worn jeans and a dark T-shirt, barefoot, hair mussed in a way that tells me he dragged a hand through it repeatedly. He looks from Ruiz to Tessa to me, taking us in like we’re a puzzle someone dumped on his doorstep.
“Detective,” he says first, voice steady. “You weren’t due to yell at me again until next week.”
Ruiz doesn’t smile. “New development,” he says. “You heard about the fire.”
“I saw the lights,” Liam answers. His gaze flicks past us to my house, and his jaw tightens. “And I pulled up my exterior feeds. I’ve already got clips queued for you.”
I swallow. My porch, my burning rag, my flailing with buckets—angles of my panic caught, stored, filed by the man who once edited my words.
“Good,” Ruiz says. “We’ll deal with that. In the meantime, I’m recommending Ms. Ellison and Ms. Kane stay here for a few days.”
Liam’s eyes snap back to my face. Surprise flashes there, followed by something I refuse to name. He masks it quickly.
“Here,” he repeats. “You’re serious.”
“Your security is better than hers,” Ruiz says. “And we already know whoever’s targeting her knows her address. Adding another unknown location just increases risk.”
Liam’s focus lingers on me. “This is what you want?” he asks.
The question lands like a spotlight. Refusal burns on my tongue. I straighten my shoulders.
“This is what keeps my porch from being the prologue,” I say. “That’s as close to ‘want’ as you’re getting.”
Something in his expression eases at the word “prologue,” twisted recognition of how I speak. He steps back, opening the door wider.
“Then come in,” he says. “Shoes off. Bags wherever. We can go over the ground rules when you’re not standing in a fog bank.”
Tessa snorts. “He has ground rules,” she murmurs under her breath.
“You have no idea,” I say.
The air inside his house hits me first: cooler than mine, edged with coffee and electronics and the faint lemon of some cleaning product I don’t recognize. The floors are smooth under my socks. The silence hums—HVAC, server fans, the distant tick of plumbing.
Glass is everywhere: the long window wall along the living room, the glass panel in the stair rail, the glossy black of monitor screens asleep for the moment on the far wall. This house is built like a camera lens turned inside out.
Ruiz steps in behind us, eyes scanning corners, noting cameras mounted where ceiling meets wall. “You’ve added more since I was here last,” he says.
“New contractor tried to put a blind spot by the side gate,” Liam answers. “I fixed it.”
Of course he did.
He leads us down the hall. “Two guest rooms,” he says. “One here, one at the end. You can decide who gets which. Bathroom between them. My room is on the other side of the stairwell, office downstairs. You’ll hear me typing at stupid hours.”
“We know,” I say before I can stop myself.
He flinches, just a little. “Right,” he says softly. “Of course you do.”
Ruiz lingers in the doorway as we set our bags on the neatly made beds. “I’ll get those clips from you now,” he says to Liam. “Then I’m back at the station. I want you two to rest. For real.”
“Not sure that’s on the menu,” Tessa says.
He gives us a look that is half warning, half encouragement. “Try,” he says. “Text me if anything feels off. And I mean anything.”
After he leaves, his absence leaves a different kind of pressure, like the air right before a storm. The house feels both quieter and more crowded.
Liam hovers in the hallway. “I’ll show you how to trigger a lockdown from in here,” he says. “Panic buttons, safe room, the whole paranoid package. Later. For now, your doors lock from the inside. There’s a camera in the hall, not in your rooms. You’ll see its indicator light when it’s active.”
“So we’re protected and observed,” I say.
“Welcome to 2023,” he replies. “Protected and observed is the only category left.”
Micro-hook: I glance past him to the wall of dormant screens and wonder which version of me they will cut together this time—victim, asset, unreliable witness, woman who keeps walking into his frame.
Night in Liam’s guest room feels too clean.
The sheets smell faintly of detergent and something colder, like metal and stored air. My own pillowcase from home, hastily shoved into my bag, carries a ghost of my shampoo and the smoke from last night. I press my face into that corner and breathe until the shake in my hands steadies.
Down the hall, I hear Tessa in the bathroom, water running, cabinet doors thudding. Further away, through the quiet, the soft clack of keys from Liam’s office drifts upward, irregular but constant.
The window in this room faces the side yard. The glass is thick, double-paned, with a nearly invisible sensor dot at the corner. Beyond it, the fog reflects the security lights, turning the side of his house into a pale, luminous wall. No view of my own porch from here; that lives on his screens now.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. A small black dome near the door marks the hallway camera just outside, its tiny LED a muted glow. I know, intellectually, that the lens doesn’t extend into this room. My skin doesn’t believe it. My brain keeps sketching lines from that dot to my bed.
Memory used to be my private film. Then EMDR, and Liam’s interviews, and hacked drafts turned it into shared content. Now my present has a built-in audience too.
Tessa pokes her head in, hair damp, wearing one of Liam’s oversized T-shirts she must have bullied from him. “You good?” she asks.
“Define ‘good,’” I say.
She comes in, sits on the edge of the bed, and bumps my knee with hers. “He showed me the panic button,” she says. “You push it, the house locks down and calls Ruiz. Honestly? It’s the sexiest thing about him.”
A laugh bursts out of me before I can swallow it. It feels wrong and necessary at the same time.
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” I tell her.
“Oh, I plan to,” she says. Her expression sobers. “Thank you for not making this harder than it already is.”
“Give it time,” I answer. “I have a whole repertoire of bad coping choices.”
She squeezes my ankle, then stands. “Sleep,” she orders. “We can fight over narrative control in the morning.”
After she leaves, I turn off the lamp. Darkness folds over the room, softer than the one across the street. The hum of Liam’s servers becomes the new distant freeway, a mechanical surf under everything.
In the quiet, my mind drifts to the office downstairs, to the monitors that can show my porch burning from angles I never saw, to the directories of footage labeled by date and threat level. Tomorrow, or the day after, I know I will end up in front of those screens.
I roll onto my side, facing the door. Somewhere beyond it, down the hall and across the stairwell, Liam sleeps or types or watches. I can’t tell which version of him fills the dark—man who lied, man who warned me, man the police call for help.
My body relaxes by degrees, guarded but not on full siren like last night. Inside that slackening, a separate tension curls tight: the knowledge that my safest option is to live inside the frame of the man who already edited my story once.
I close my eyes and listen to the house breathe, and a question settles heavy on my chest, heavier than any blanket: in a place wired to catch every angle, what new footage will I let him capture before I walk back out into the open?