And for the first time since the foyer — for the first time, honestly, in longer than that — I stopped being afraid.

It is a strange thing, fear leaving a body.

I had been carrying it so long, low and constant, the background hum of a woman who has slowly realized she is not safe in her own house, that I had stopped experiencing it as fear and started experiencing it as simply the weather of my life.

And it lifted, in that hospital bed, the moment I made that call, because I understood that the plan I had built for exactly this had just begun to move, and that it was bigger and stronger than anything they had done to me, and that they did not know it existed.

Phoebe Reed was, to my husband, an old family attorney, a name on some paperwork, a woman he had met twice and instantly forgotten.

What Flynn did not know — what Flynn had never bothered to learn, because knowing things about his wife was not a priority for a man who had married a convenience — was that Phoebe had represented me, personally, since the day I inherited my grandfather’s estate.