He woke up. He couldn’t face the public shame of your arrest. He’s gone, Mara. Sign the papers, take the ten-thousand-dollar buyout enclosed, and disappear before the marshals come for you.

It felt like a fault line cracking open beneath my ribs.

I dropped into the kitchen chair, my fingers trembling too badly to hold the paper steady. I stared at the signature. I traced the dried ink with my thumb.

Grief threatened to pull me under. My brain screamed that he’d abandoned me — that his mother’s pressure and the threat of my ruin had been too much.

Then a different part of my mind woke up. The part that had survived ambushes in the desert. The intelligence officer.

I forced myself to breathe. Think, Mara.