The wedding ring made a tiny metallic sound when Zuri placed it on the galley counter.
Ethan stared at it.
Five years had changed almost everything about the woman standing in front of him.
Her shoulders carried a tension he did not remember.
Her eyes checked doorways before they settled anywhere.
Even her silence felt trained.
But he knew that ring.
He had slid it onto her finger himself.
“You were never supposed to find me,” Zuri whispered.
Ethan lifted his eyes from the ring.
For five years he had imagined this moment in a hundred different ways.
He had imagined finding her injured.
He had imagined finding her trapped somewhere.
He had imagined a hospital calling with a mistake, an investigator arriving with impossible news, Zuri walking through his front door and telling him there had been some terrible misunderstanding.
He had never imagined her standing three feet away and admitting that she had meant to stay gone.
“You knew I was looking for you.”
It was not a question.
Zuri looked toward the curtain again.
“Keep your voice down.”
Something inside Ethan hardened.
“I buried you.”
“I know.”
“I stood in front of hundreds of people while they told me how sorry they were.”
Her eyes closed briefly.
“I know.”
“Private investigators searched for you for years.”
“I know.”
His hand flattened against the counter.
“Then tell me what I apparently don’t know.”
Zuri looked at him for a long time.
When she finally spoke, the polished flight-attendant voice was gone.
“Three weeks before I disappeared, somebody got into our home.”
Ethan went still.
“No alarm went off,” she continued.
“Nothing was stolen.
I almost convinced myself I had imagined it.”
“What happened?”
“There was an envelope beneath my pillow.”
Ethan’s expression changed.
Zuri remembered every detail.
White paper.
No return address.
No fingerprints she could see.
Inside were photographs of Ethan leaving places that were not on any public schedule: a private entrance beneath Cole headquarters, a restaurant where he met lawyers after midnight, the airfield he used when he wanted to travel without attention.
There was one sentence with them.
Leave him, or eventually we stop taking pictures.
Ethan’s face became unreadable.
“You should have told me.”
“I was going to.”
“Going to?”
“The next morning another photograph appeared on my phone.”
She swallowed.
“It was you sleeping.”
The anger vanished from Ethan’s face.
For the first time, he understood why she kept looking toward exits.
“They had been inside the bedroom?”
