The café on Western Avenue had good coffee and better light. I'd been going three mornings a week since I got back to Seattle, sitting at the same corner table where the sun hit the brick wall just right. It felt like mine. A small, ordinary thing that belonged only to me.
I should have known better than to trust anything felt safe in this city.
I was halfway through my first sip when Kimberly's shadow fell across the table. She didn't ask to sit. She just did, sliding into the chair across from me like she had every right to be there. Mack pulled out the chair beside her a second later, his bulk making the small table feel smaller.
"Mom," I said. Flat. Not a greeting. An acknowledgment.
"Don't 'Mom' me." Kimberly's hand went into her bag and came out with a stack of paper, thick enough that it made a sharp slapping sound when she dropped it on the table between us. "Explain this."
I looked down. Printed screenshots. Text bubbles, gray and green, a phone number I recognized as my old one—the one I'd disconnected five years ago from a hospital bed. The messages were ugly. *You'll regret stealing him. Watch your back. I hope you burn too.*
Something cold moved through my chest. Not fear. Recognition. This was Fallon's handwriting, even if the words weren't hers.
"I didn't send these," I said.
Kimberly's laugh was sharp and humorless. "Of course you'll say that." Her voice dropped, low and venomous, leaning across the table like she wanted only me to hear it. "You were always jealous of Fallon. Always. Even before Ronin. You should be grateful he even married you in the first place, Maeve. A girl like you."
A girl like you. I'd heard that phrase my whole childhood, usually followed by a comparison I could never win.
"These are fabricated," I said. My voice didn't rise. "That number's been dead for five years. Anyone with a laptop and twenty minutes could have made these."
"Don't lie to your mother." Mack's voice cut in, hard and flat. He reached across the table and closed his hand around my wrist before I saw it coming. His grip was tight enough to bruise, thumb pressing into the soft underside where my pulse was already hammering. "Call her. Right now. Apologize. Put it on speaker so we can all hear it."
The café noise seemed to fade—the espresso machine, the murmur of other conversations, all of it going distant and thin. My wrist throbbed under his fingers, and for one disorienting second I was twelve years old again, watching Mack get away with something while I got blamed for flinching.
I yanked my arm back. Hard. He wasn't expecting it—his grip broke, and I cradled my wrist against my chest, the skin already stinging where his fingers had dug in.
"Don't touch me again," I said. Quiet. Even. That was the only way I knew how to sound dangerous.
"Maeve—" Kimberly started.
"You chose a stranger over your own daughter." I looked at her, really looked, the way you look at something you're trying to memorize so you never forget it. "That's a debt you'll never be able to repay."
I reached into my bag, pulled out a ten, and set it on the table beside my untouched coffee. Then I stood, smoothed the front of my coat, and walked out.
Neither of them followed. I didn't look back to check.
What I didn't see—what I wouldn't learn about until later—was the man in the gray jacket two tables over, who had been there before I arrived and left thirty seconds after I did, already typing into his phone.
*Tobias. Confirmed contact, Spencer family, 8:47 AM. Physical altercation. Subject uninjured, distressed. Advise.*
That evening, Tobias sat at the desk in his study with his laptop open, the glow of the screen the only light in the room. I stood in the doorway and watched him read something on the screen, watched his jaw go tight and then very, very still. He didn't slam the laptop shut. He didn't raise his voice. He just closed it slowly, like a man setting down something heavy so it wouldn't break.
Then he made two phone calls. I didn't ask who. I didn't need to. I recognized the tone—level, unhurried, final. The tone of a man quietly moving pieces into place.
Later, in bed, he turned to face me in the dark. "I know what happened this morning," he said. No apology for saying it. Just fact.
I didn't ask how. "I'm fine."
"I know you are." His hand found mine under the blanket, thumb brushing gently over the wrist Mack had grabbed, like he could feel the ghost of the bruise forming. "I want to know if you want me to act. Now. Tonight, if that's what you need."
I thought about Kimberly's hiss, about Mack's hand, about the ten dollars I'd left on the table because I refused to leave that place owing anyone anything.
"Not yet," I said. "I need to do something first."
He didn't ask what. He just nodded once in the dark, and I felt him settle beside me, patient, waiting—the way he'd been waiting for five years.
