Dinner started normal enough. Roasted chicken, the good china, Wesley scrolling on his phone under the table like Cassius couldn't see. Then Katalina set down her fork and pressed a hand to her chest.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she said. Her voice shook just right. "But I can't keep pretending I'm not scared."

Cassius put his own fork down. "Scared of what?"

"Today. In the hallway." She looked at me, and her eyes filled up on command, like a faucet turning. "Audrey came right up to me. She said if anything happened to me, or to the baby, it would be my fault. She said it so calm, Cassius. That's what scared me. How calm she was."

I hadn't said a word to her all day. I hadn't been near her.

Wesley looked up from his phone for the first time all dinner. He didn't say anything. He just watched me the way you'd watch something on the news, some stranger's disaster.

Cassius's fist came down on the table hard enough to rattle the glasses. "Apologize to her."

"I never said that."

"She's pregnant, Audrey. She's carrying my child. And you're standing there threatening her?"

"I never said that," I said again. Quieter this time. Not because I was backing down. Because I already knew it didn't matter what I said.

Katalina dabbed under her eye with her napkin, careful not to smudge anything. Underneath the napkin, for just a second, I caught the corner of her mouth. It wasn't trembling. It was almost smiling.

I looked at my son. Eleven years old, and he was watching his mother get accused of threatening a baby, and there was nothing on his face. No doubt. No question. Just that same bored contempt, waiting to see what would happen next.

I set my fork down. I folded my napkin into a neat square and laid it beside my plate. Then I stood up and walked out of the dining room, and nobody called after me, and I didn't look back to see if they watched me go.

That was the last dinner I ever had in that house.

---

The message came through at 6:14 in the morning, while the house was still dark. I'd learned to check the device the second I woke, before my eyes even adjusted to the light. Three words and a number.

*Extraction window: 72 hours.*

I lay there a minute, feeling my own heartbeat instead of hearing it, and then I got up and started working.

Not packing clothes. Clothes could be replaced, and besides, none of what hung in that closet belonged to the woman I was about to become. I didn't take photographs either. Every photograph in that house had Cassius in it, or Wesley, or some version of a smile I didn't trust anymore, not even on my own face.

What I packed was years of handwriting. Notebooks I'd filled in secret, back when I still had a mind sharp enough to notice things and a habit I never let go of — dosages, symptoms, dates, the small cruelties nobody else would ever write down because nobody else needed proof the way I did. My research, too, half-finished papers from before I ever became somebody's wife, kept in a box I told myself for years I'd get back to.

I wrapped it all in plastic and sealed it in a waterproof case, the kind fishermen use, and I put the case at the bottom of my gym bag under a folded yoga mat nobody in that house had ever seen me use.

Seventy-two hours. I counted them the way I used to count Cassius's silences on the marble floor. One. Two.

---

My mother called on the second day.

"You've lost weight," she said, no hello first. That was Margaret Lane. Straight to the wound. "I saw you at the grocery store parking lot last week, from across the street. I almost didn't recognize you, Audrey."

"I've been busy."

"Busy doesn't blister your arms like that." A pause, the kind she used to let stretch out when I was a teenager and she knew I was lying about where I'd been. "I called Dr. Kim's office. I talked to your neighbor, the one with the dog. Audrey, something is wrong in that house."

"Mom, please." My voice came out flatter than I meant it to. "Please stop asking questions."

"Why would I stop—"

"I'll explain everything soon," I said. "I promise. Just — give me a little time. Please stop asking around."

She went quiet on the other end, and I could picture her exactly, sitting at her kitchen table with the phone pressed too hard against her ear, the way she always did when she was worried and trying not to show it.

"Okay," she said finally. "Okay, Bella. I'll wait."

I told her I loved her. I meant it more than I'd meant anything I'd said out loud in that house in years. I didn't know, hanging up the phone, that I was already running out of time to keep any promise I made her. I didn't know a lot of things yet. I only knew the clock in my chest, ticking down toward seventy-two hours, toward the last version of myself I would ever have to be.

The call came at 4 a.m. on the third day.

I knew before I answered. Some part of me had been waiting for a call like that for weeks, the way you wait for a storm you can already smell in the air.

"Your mother," Cassius said. No greeting. "There was an accident. A car, on Route 9. The police say it happened fast."

I sat up in the dark. My hand found the edge of the mattress and gripped it. "Is she—"

"She didn't make it, Audrey."

The words landed somewhere far away, like they belonged to someone else's mother. I heard myself say, "When," and I heard him say, "Last night, around ten," and none of it felt real, not the rain he mentioned, not the slick road, not any of it.

"I need to go to her," I said. "I need to see her."

"Tomorrow. Not tonight." A pause, and then, flat as a closed door: "Katalina's blood pressure spiked when she heard. The doctor wants her resting. Just — keep it together, all right? Don't make this harder on everyone."

I didn't say anything. I let the phone go quiet against my ear until he hung up first.

Later, a neighbor of my mother's called to tell me how sorry she was, how she still couldn't believe it. "There was a woman by a few days before," she added, almost as an afterthought. "Said she was thinking of buying the Fentons' old place down the street. Real friendly. Asked your mom all sorts of questions — her walks, what time she liked to go out, that kind of thing." The neighbor laughed a little, embarrassed. "Funny what people ask when they're just being neighborly."

I didn't laugh. I wrote the date down in my notebook, the one nobody knew I kept, and I underlined it twice.

The funeral was small. Cassius came for an hour, said the right things to the right people, and left early because Katalina needed him at an appointment. Wesley didn't come at all. He had a game.

I went to the cemetery alone three days later, before the sun was all the way up. The hillside was wrapped in fog so thick I couldn't see the road behind me, only the shapes of headstones rising up out of the wet grass like something surfacing from underwater. My mother's name was still sharp-edged on the new granite, the letters not yet softened by weather.

I knelt. My knees sank into the cold ground. I set down a single white chrysanthemum against the base of the stone, the way she used to arrange flowers on the kitchen table when I was small — one flower, never a bunch, because she said a bunch was showing off and one flower was honest.

"I'm sorry I didn't listen to you," I told her. "I'm sorry I told you to stop asking questions."

I didn't cry. I hadn't cried in months, not since the sauna, not since the marble floor. Something in me had gone dry the way a well goes dry, and I'd stopped expecting water to come back up.

I don't know how long I knelt there. Long enough that my knees went numb through my jeans, long enough that the fog started thinning at the edges, gray turning to a paler gray.

Then I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind me. Slow. Unhurried. The kind of walk that belonged to someone who had all the time in the world.

I turned my head.

Katalina stood at the cemetery gate, one hand resting on the wrought iron, her belly round under a long wool coat. She wasn't out of breath. She wasn't cold, either, or if she was, she didn't show it. Her face, when I found it through the fog, wore an expression I hadn't seen on her before — not the practiced tremble she used for Cassius, not the wide wet eyes she used for Wesley. Something quieter. Something almost tender.

She looked like a woman visiting a garden she'd planted herself.

"Audrey," she said, and her voice carried easy across the wet grass, no breathiness in it at all. "I thought I might find you here."

I stayed kneeling. My hand was still resting on the cold stone, on my mother's name.

"How did you know where to find me?"

Katalina tilted her head, the fog curling pale around her shoulders, and smiled the way you'd smile at someone who had finally, finally caught up to a truth you'd been holding all along.

Katalina came closer. Not fast. She moved the way you'd move through a museum, stopping to look at something you'd paid good money to see.

She crouched down beside me, one hand braced on her knee for balance, her belly pressing against the wool of her coat. The fog wrapped around us both, close and wet, turning the rest of the cemetery into nothing but gray shapes and silence.

"I hired him three weeks ago," she said. Her voice was soft. Conversational. Like we were two friends catching up over coffee. "A man with a truck. He needed money. I needed someone who wouldn't ask questions. Your mother walked the same route every night after dinner. Route 9, right past the Fentons' old place. I went by a few days before, just to make sure. She was so sweet to me, Audrey. She told me all about her evening walks. How she liked the quiet."

I couldn't move. My hand was still on my mother's name, the granite cold and real under my palm, the only solid thing left in the world.

"It was quick," Katalina added. Almost kind. "The police said she didn't suffer. I made sure of that. I'm not a monster."

She watched my face. I felt her watching the way you feel a spider on your skin, patient and still, waiting to see what you'll do.

"She was asking questions," Katalina said. "Calling people. Your neighbor. Your doctor. She was going to ruin everything, Audrey. You have to understand. I built this. I spent years building it. Your husband. Your son. Your house. And you—" She shook her head, almost disappointed. "You should have just left when you had the chance."

She stood up. Brushed the damp grass off her knee. She looked down at me one more time, her face calm as glass, and then she pulled something small from her coat pocket. A phone. She tapped the screen twice.

The ground opened up.

That's what it felt like. Not an explosion. The ground just—opened, and sound became pressure, and pressure became heat, and heat became something that picked me up and threw me backward into the headstones like I weighed nothing at all.

I hit granite. My shoulder cracked against the edge of someone else's grave, and pain went through me sharp and white and total. I couldn't hear. I couldn't see anything but smoke and dirt and pieces of my mother's headstone scattered across the wet grass.

I tried to push myself up. My left arm wouldn't move right. Something warm ran down my side, soaking through my shirt, and when I looked down I saw red spreading fast across the fabric, darker than it should be, too much of it.

Through the smoke, I saw Katalina stumbling toward her car. She was clutching her stomach with both hands, her face twisted up, her mouth open. Even from here, even through the ringing in my ears, I could hear her. She was crying. Loud, wet, gasping sobs. The kind that carry.

She got into her car and pulled the door shut. I watched her take her phone out again, watched her press it to her ear. I couldn't hear what she said, but I could see her face in the window. She wasn't crying anymore.

I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough that the smoke started clearing. Long enough that I heard tires on gravel, fast, too fast, and then a car door slamming and footsteps running.

"Katalina!" Cassius's voice, raw and scared in a way I'd never heard it. "Katalina, where are you—"

He ran right past me.

I was on the ground ten feet from him, bleeding into the grass, and he ran past me like I was part of the landscape. Like I was another headstone.

He dropped to his knees beside her car. She was out now, leaning against the door, one hand pressed to her belly, her face pale and perfect and wet with tears. He pulled her into his arms and she collapsed against his chest, and I watched him hold her the way I used to imagine he'd hold me if something terrible ever happened.

"The baby," she whispered. I heard it clear across the cemetery. "Cassius, the baby—"

"You're okay," he said. "You're okay, I've got you."

He didn't look back. Not once.

I reached into my coat with my right hand. My fingers were shaking so hard I almost dropped it—the device, the one they gave me with the federal seal and the emergency frequency I wasn't supposed to use unless I had no other choice.

I had no other choice.

I pressed it to my ear. The ringing was still there, but underneath it I heard the tone, steady and cold and waiting.

"Designation Nightingale-7," I said. My voice came out steady. I don't know how. "Coordinates 47.6205 north, 122.3493 west. Cemetery off Route 9. I need extraction. Now."

The voice on the other end didn't ask questions. "Confirmed. Hold position. ETA forty minutes."

I let the device fall into the grass beside me. I looked up at the sky, gray and low and heavy with fog, and I counted my own heartbeat because it was the only thing left I could count on.

Forty minutes.

I made it thirty-eight before I heard the helicopter.