[Bailee’s POV]
Mom is sitting at the kitchen table with a piece of paper in front of her, and her face is wearing the calm that means something terrible has happened. I've seen this face exactly three times—when the doctors said inoperable, when the bills arrived, and now.
"What is that?" My bag hits the floor with a thud that echoes.
"Sit down first." She pushes the paper toward me without touching it, the way you'd handle something that bites.
I don't sit. I pick up the paper and my hands don't shake, which I count as a victory. Single printed line, no signature: drop the claim or we come back.
Or we come back. The or does the heavy lifting—casual, almost polite, like a neighbour offering groceries, except the groceries are a threat and the neighbour knows where I sleep.
"How long ago?" My voice does what my hands refused to—trembles on the last word.
"About an hour." Mom’s hands are steady around her tea, and I hate how much I envy that steadiness. "I didn't call because I wanted to handle it without scaring you."
My recovering mother, sitting in a kitchen chair with her handful of pills in a cabinet above her head, trying to protect her pregnant daughter from a threat slid under their own door. My throat closes around something that tastes like every failure I've ever catalogued.
I call Spencer. He answers on the second ring, which means he was already holding his phone. I give him the address in three flat sentences and hang up before my voice can betray me again.
He's at the apartment in twenty minutes with Blake, both of them filling the doorway quickly and efficiently. Miles arrives six minutes after—out of breath, jacket askew, radiating the energy of a man who treated every red light as a polite suggestion.
The three of them fill mom’s small kitchen like a siege, too much wolf for a space designed for quiet survival.
I watch mom watch them—three wolves crowding her countertops, speaking in low urgent tones about security and burner phones and a car Miles clocked two nights ago and said nothing about.
She catches my eye across the room and raises one eyebrow—a single gesture that communicates an entire novel about the men currently occupying her kitchen.
"Plates trace to a rental agency." Blake lowers his phone. "Cash transaction, no ID. Someone's paying to stay invisible."
"Celeste." I say it flat because the name stopped surprising me weeks ago. It's become less a person and more a weather system—constant, destructive, and entirely indifferent to the damage.
"Can't prove it yet." Spencer, jaw tight. "But this address is compromised."
"Meaning you can't stay here." Blake, direct as a blade. "No security, the address is exposed, and whoever did this knows where you sleep."
"This is my home." My voice goes sharp. "Mine and mom’s."
"He's right." Mom, firm and final. My mouth closes mid-argument. "Stubbornness is a luxury neither of us can afford, and I won't pretend a locked door is protection when someone already almost walked through it."
I look at my mother and the fight dies in my throat—not because I lost, but because mom won with the one weapon I have never learned to counter. Being right while simultaneously being the person I would dismantle the world brick by brick to protect.
"My place." Miles says it before the others can. "Guest room, security system, doorman who once rejected a delivery driver for wearing the wrong shoes."
Spencer and Blake exchange a look—territorial, compressed into a single glance, a full conversation conducted in the private language of brothers who've been negotiating since before they could walk.
Neither objects, miracuoulosly. “I will coordinate with building security,” finally concedes Spencer. “Blake, you—”
“Rental agency,” Blake doesn’t let him finish. Takes his jacket, shrugs it on, ready as ever. “I’ll run through them. Cash or not, something was definitely signed.” Spencer nods approvingly.
I pack while mom supervises from the hallway with the authority of a general directing a retreat she didn't authorise.
"Your folding technique is criminal." She points at the blouse I'm shoving into the duffel. "That will look like you slept in a dumpster."
"I'm packing for survival, not a fashion editorial." But I refold it, because arguing with mom’s textile standards requires more energy than the universe contains.
"Vitamins." She points at the kitchen. "Cabinet above the stove. Don't think I haven't been counting."
"You've been counting my pills?" I pause, caught between amused horror and the ache of a mother who tracks her daughter's health through prenatal inventory.
"I'm your mother." She says it like a job description requiring no further explanation. "I count everything."
Two more directions from mom and two more hours later, I’m standing at Miles's apartment. That’s where he becomes someone I've never seen—nervous, fidgeting, pointing out the bathroom twice and explaining the coffee machine with a thoroughness that suggests he believes I was raised by people who drank from garden hoses.
"I know how coffee works, Miles." I'm in the guest room doorway with my bag cutting into my shoulder and the exhaustion of a woman who's been threatened, uprooted, and relocated in three hours.
"Right, I’m sorry, I’m just— Anyway, the grind settings are different though, and the water reservoir is on the left instead of—" He stops. The unfinished sentence hangs between us, warm and unguarded and too honest for a hallway.
"You just what?" I ask, because the rawness of his almost-sentence deserves to land.
"I'm glad you're here." Four words, stripped of every performance I've seen Miles deploy. No charm, no deflection. "That's all."
I close the guest room door and sit on the edge of a bed that smells like clean cotton and faintly of Miles—that warm, sun-soaked scent my body catalogues against every order I give it.
The apartment is quiet in a way mom’s kitchen never is, and the silence has the strange, unfamiliar texture of safety.
My fingers find the envelope in my bag. Still sealed, still waiting, still carrying the answer to a question I've been running from since a courier office and a parking lot confrontation with storm-blue eyes that feels like it happened in another woman's life entirely.
I turn it in my hands. The paper is slightly warm from pressing against my laptop all day, and the weight of it is absurd—a single sheet containing enough truth to rearrange four lives. One tear, one page, one name.
I put it in the nightstand drawer. Not tonight. Tonight the only truth I can carry is that I'm safe, in a building with a lock and a doorman and a man on the other side of this wall who explained a coffee machine three times because he didn't know how to say stay.
From the kitchen—dishes being put away, careful, quiet, the domestic choreography of someone trying not to disturb a woman he can't stop thinking about. The ordinariness of it presses against something behind my eyes, and the sting arrives before I can prevent it.
I press my palms flat against the bedspread and breathe until the burning retreats. Then I turn off the lamp and lie in the dark, listening to a man's apartment settle around me—a shelter I didn't ask for and can't bring myself to refuse.
________________