Pink blanket.
Sleeping against my chest.
My blood turned to ice.
I checked the door.
Locked.
Windows.
Nothing disturbed.
Then I saw the note beneath the frame.
You should have sold.
I called security immediately.
Within minutes, my building was locked down.
Camera footage showed nobody entering my apartment.
Then the concierge found something.
A maintenance access log.
One card had opened my service door at 8:42 p.m.
Registered to Carter Retail executive security.
The badge belonged to someone I knew.
My head of security.
Marcus Reed.
The man responsible for protecting me.
Chapter 8
Marcus Reed had protected me for eleven years.
He knew my schedule.
My home.
My office.
My emergency routes.
He had stood ten feet from Naomi’s grave during the foundation’s tenth anniversary ceremony.
I trusted him enough to know where I slept.
That suddenly became terrifying.
Police found him at Carter headquarters.
He did not run.
He did not resist.
He looked confused when they approached him.
That made everything worse.
The badge logs showed his credentials.
The camera system showed no image.
The physical entry panel showed access.
Yet Marcus claimed he had never left the office.
“I was in the security command center all evening.”
They checked.
He was telling the truth.
Seven employees saw him.
Camera footage confirmed it.
So somebody cloned his badge.
Again.
Another false trail.
Another trusted person made to look guilty.
Adrian’s favorite trick.
Turn trust into suspicion.
My apartment remained a crime scene until three in the morning.
The photograph of Naomi came from my bedroom.
Not a duplicate.
The original.
Whoever entered knew exactly where to look.
That frightened me more than the note.
They weren’t trying to kill me.
They wanted me to know they could reach me.
My attorney begged me to move into a secure hotel.
I refused.
Marcus insisted.
I refused again.
Then Richard arrived.
I had not called him.
Victoria had.
He walked into my apartment carrying an overnight bag.
I stared.
“Making sure you’re not alone.”
“I have security.”
“Security whose badges can be cloned.”
“Richard.”
He set the bag down.
“I’ll sleep on the couch.”
I almost laughed from exhaustion.
“You’re a sixty-four-year-old private equity chairman.”
“You have three houses.”
“And you want to sleep on my couch.”
He looked at the photograph of Naomi on the evidence table.
“Because someone used your dead child to scare you.”
He continued quietly.
“And because nobody should spend tonight alone after that.”
I looked away.
No victory.
No smile.
Just presence.
At four in the morning, neither of us was sleeping.
We sat in my kitchen drinking terrible coffee.
He asked about Naomi.
People rarely did.
Most people feared grief like it was contagious.
“What was she like?”
“She hated socks.”
He smiled.
“At six months?”
“She kicked them off constantly.”
I laughed softly.
“She had this little angry face whenever I put them back on.”
Richard listened.
I told him about the hospital.
About the infection.
About how quickly everything changed.
How one morning I was arguing with my husband about formula brands.
Three days later, we were choosing a coffin.
Richard didn’t interrupt.
When I finished, he said:
“My wife died fourteen years ago.”
Victoria’s mother.
“Cancer?”
He stared at the coffee.
“Victoria was twenty-three.”
“She seems like she was angry before yesterday.”
He laughed quietly.
“That’s fair.”
Then he grew serious.
“I buried myself in work.”
“So did I.”
“She buried herself in status.”
Grief makes strange houses.
Some people live in work.
Some in anger.
Some in money.
Some in control.
“Did you ever talk about her mother?”
“Not enough.”
“That sounds familiar.”
We sat quietly.
For the first time, Richard Whitmore did not feel like an acquisition partner.
He felt like another person who had survived the kind of loss that divides life into before and after.
At seven, Marcus called.
Investigators found how the badge was cloned.
Caleb had photographed access credentials during his store visits.
They believed he built duplicate RFID cards.
But Caleb was already in custody when someone entered my apartment.
Meaning another person was still active.
Adrian was detained.