I needed an ally on the outside. Someone with legal standing. Someone who had as much to lose as I did.

I needed Lucas.

The problem was reaching him. My nurses tracked my every move; Grant’s security monitored the perimeter. I was a prisoner. So I spent two days analyzing shift changes and delivery schedules, and I noticed that every Thursday at 10:15 the organic grocery delivery arrived.

The driver — a kid who always wore massive headphones — left the boxes at the side service door, and the day nurse, Maria, would step out for exactly three minutes to bring them in, leaving the side gate unlocked.

A terrifyingly narrow window.

On Wednesday night I used the Aegis system to send a spoofed, encrypted text to Lucas’s private number, which I’d pulled from Vanessa’s intercepted iCloud backup.