I opened the security app.
It still worked.
My thumb shook as I scrolled backward.
There it was.
Wednesday afternoon.
My car pulling into the driveway.
Me trying my key.
Fiona beside me.
Me calling David.
And earlier that day, footage of a locksmith arriving while David stood on the porch.
I stopped breathing.
“Blaire?” Rachel asked.
“I have it.”
“What?”
“The lock change.”
“Download a copy and leave the original account untouched.”
For the first time since Wednesday, I felt something other than fear.
Not relief.
Not yet.
But ground.
Something solid beneath my feet.
Luca offered to take us directly to Natalie’s apartment.
Then Marcus quietly told him the investigators had already contacted Natalie.
My cousin called less than a minute later.
“Two people just buzzed the building asking about you,” she said.
I closed my eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Where are you?”
“In a car.”
“With who?”
I looked at Luca.
“That part is going to sound strange.”
Twenty minutes later, Natalie knew enough to say, “You are absolutely not bringing this circus to my building tonight.”
“I don’t want to impose on anyone else.”
“You’re not imposing. I’m saying stay somewhere secure until your lawyer tells you what to do.”
Luca waited until I ended the call.
“I have a guesthouse in the Hudson Valley,” he said. “Separate building. Staffed. You and Fiona can use it tonight. No obligation beyond tonight.”
I hesitated.
“Why are you doing this?”
The answer did not come quickly.
He looked at his hands.
“Because I know what it is like when a private family problem suddenly becomes something other people think they are entitled to watch.”
I remembered what he had said about people filming him.
He continued.
“My divorce was public. More public than it needed to be. There were stories every week, many of them wrong. I had money, lawyers, security, and I still remember the feeling of walking into a room wondering who had already decided what kind of person I was.”
He looked at Fiona, who was hugging Mr. Buttons.
“I also know that children remember how adults behave when things fall apart.”
That answer I believed.
We went to the guesthouse.
It was not a cottage.
People like Luca apparently used the word guesthouse differently from the rest of us.
It had three bedrooms, a kitchen larger than the one in my townhouse, and windows overlooking the Hudson River through rows of late-summer trees.
Fiona ran directly to the window.
“Mommy, there’s a boat.”
“I see it.”
“Can we live here?”
I almost laughed.
“Let’s make it through tonight.”
Luca stayed ten minutes.
Before leaving, he placed a card on the kitchen counter.
“Marcus’s number. Mine is already in your phone. Rachel will call when she has Illinois counsel.”
“You really don’t have to keep doing this.”
“I know.”
“That somehow makes it stranger.”
He smiled.
“Get some sleep, Blaire.”
After he left, I sat on the floor beside Fiona’s bed until she fell asleep.
Then I went into the bathroom and cried so hard I had to sit on the edge of the tub.
Not because David had found me.
Not because Luca Sterling had rescued me.
He hadn’t.
I cried because for the first time in days, nobody was demanding anything from me.
There was no locked door.
No declined card.
No voice telling me I was overreacting.
No need to keep my face calm so Fiona would not be scared.
By midnight, I was on a video call with an Illinois family attorney named Miriam Cole.
She was in her fifties, wore reading glasses on a chain, and had the reassuring manner of someone who did not confuse drama with urgency.
