“I didn’t know.
Maybe they had a camera.
Maybe someone on the staff was helping them.
Maybe it was taken through the window.
That was the point.
They wanted me not to know how close they were.”
Ethan’s mind began moving the way it did during a corporate crisis, except this time every possibility made his stomach turn.
“Why didn’t you take it to security?”
“Because the photograph showed something only security should have known.”
She explained that the image contained a folder on Ethan’s bedside table from a confidential meeting that had been moved at the last minute.
Only a small circle of employees and security personnel knew where Ethan would be that night.
“If I told the wrong person,” Zuri said, “I could have been telling the person helping them.”
Ethan stared at her.
She had been afraid inside their own home, surrounded by people he paid to keep them safe.
“And then?”
“Then they called me.”
Her fingers tightened around the edge of the counter.
The voice had been electronically distorted.
It gave her Ethan’s departure time the next morning, the registration of the vehicle scheduled to take him to the airport, and the name of the airfield.
Then it told her that if she stayed with him, one day Ethan would leave for work and never arrive.
If she warned him, they said, they would know.
If she went to police, they would know.
If she wanted Ethan alive, she had to vanish.
Ethan’s eyes were burning now.
“So you obeyed them.”
“I bought myself forty-eight hours,” she said.
“That’s what I thought I was doing.”
She had left without using a credit card, without taking her usual phone, without contacting friends.
Her intention had been to get somewhere safe, find independent help, and return when she understood who was threatening them.
Then her disappearance became public far faster than she expected.
A bag containing personal items she had left behind during her escape was found near water after a storm.
Rumors became assumptions.
Assumptions became headlines.
With no confirmed sighting and no reliable trail, people began speaking about Zuri in the past tense.
Ethan never did.
“What stopped you from coming back?” he asked.
Zuri’s voice became smaller.
“The first news report showed you leaving our building surrounded by security.”
“So?”
“I recognized one of the cars behind you.”
She had seen the same vehicle following her two days before she vanished.
Maybe it meant nothing.
Maybe it belonged to somebody legitimate.
Maybe fear had distorted what she saw.
But Zuri had already been shown that whoever threatened her possessed information from inside Ethan’s protected world.
She could not gamble with his life to find out whether she was wrong.
“So I stayed gone,” she said.
Ethan turned away.
For several seconds the only sound was the low vibration of the aircraft.
Zuri watched his reflection in the polished cabinet door.
“I thought they would lose interest,” she continued.
“I thought eventually I could contact you safely.”
“And eventually became five years.”
“Yes.”
“You watched me bury you.”
“I watched from a motel television three states away.”
