She had helped me build everything Flynn thought he had built.

And she had helped me build, underneath all of it, the thing none of them knew was there.

But I have thought a great deal about that memorized number, and what it meant that I knew it by heart, and I have had to sit with an uncomfortable truth about it.

You do not memorize an emergency number for a life you believe is safe.

Somewhere in me, for years, beneath all my willed invisibility and my careful bargains and my daily insistence that everything was fine, some clear-eyed part of me had never believed it.

That part had watched Flynn’s charm and seen the calculation underneath it.