"Judge, pull over," Kelsie demanded. "I am not going back to that house."
He ignored her. The speedometer climbed. 65. 70. He wove through the traffic with practiced ease, his left hand resting casually on the top of the steering wheel.
Kelsie slumped back in the seat, defeated. There was no point in fighting him when he was like this. He was a wall of granite.
The silence in the car stretched, thick and suffocating.
His phone was sitting in the cup holder between them. Face up.
Buzz.
The screen lit up.
Kelsie's eyes darted to it automatically.
A text message preview appeared on the lock screen.
Sender: A
Message: It hurts so much... where are you?
Kelsie's heart skipped a beat, then slammed against her ribs. The intimacy of it. The desperation. Her gaze snagged not just on the words, but on the unfamiliar number beneath the initial. A string of digits, area code 617. Her mind, a strange, unwilling trap for numbers and patterns, filed it away without her consent.
Judge's reaction was instantaneous.
His hand left the steering wheel and slapped face-down over the phone. The movement was so fast, so jerky, that the SUV swerved slightly into the shoulder. The rumble strips vibrated beneath the tires-brrrrt-before he corrected the course.
He snatched the phone up and shoved it deep into his pants pocket.
Kelsie stared at the side of his face. He was looking straight ahead, his profile rigid.
"Who is that?" Kelsie asked. Her voice sounded hollow to her own ears.
"Spam," he said. "Wrong number."
"Spam texts don't say 'It hurts so much'," Kelsie said. "And you don't almost crash the car trying to hide a wrong number."
He gripped the steering wheel tighter. His knuckles were white. "It's a victim from a case I'm working. She's... unstable. Mentally."
"So you have a victim saved in your personal phone as 'A'?"
"It's an alias," he said quickly. Too quickly. "To protect her identity."
"You're lying," Kelsie whispered.
He exhaled sharply through his nose. "Don't start this, Kelsie. Don't play detective. You're not good at it."
"I don't have to be a detective to know when my husband is lying to me."
"I am protecting a witness!" he snapped. His voice filled the car, loud and angry. "It's my job. It's classified. Stop pushing."
He was turning it around on her. Making her the unreasonable one. The prying wife who didn't understand the complexities of his heroic job.
They turned into the entrance of their gated community. The iron gates swung open as his transponder signaled them. They drove up the winding driveway to the large, colonial-style house that Kelsie had spent five years trying to make a home.
It looked like a fortress now.
Judge pulled into the garage. The heavy door rumbled down behind them, blocking out the streetlights, sealing them in.
He turned off the engine. The silence returned, heavier than before.
He unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to look at Kelsie. His expression had softened. The anger was gone, replaced by a weary, patronizing patience.
"We're home," he said. "Let's just go inside. Eat something. Sleep. We can talk in the morning."
Kelsie looked at him-this handsome, powerful man who had once been her entire world. She felt a wave of nausea.
"I don't want to talk to you," Kelsie said. "I don't even want to look at you."
She opened the door and scrambled out. She needed to get away from his scent, from the lie that hung in the air.
Judge was faster. He caught up to her at the door to the mudroom. He grabbed her wrist.
"Kelsie-"
Her phone, still in his pocket, buzzed.
He pulled it out. The screen lit up with Kia's name. A text.
He looked at it. His eyes narrowed.
Then, he held the power button down.
"What are you doing?" Kelsie reached for it.
"Turning off the noise," he said.
The screen went black. He put the dead phone back in his pocket.
"You're cutting me off," Kelsie said, realizing the extent of what he was doing. "You're isolating me."
"I'm helping you focus," he said, opening the door to the house. "On us."
