Chapter 2

On the surface, nothing about Evan had changed. He moved through our routine with the same care he always had.

He took a mug from the drying rack, stirred in a spoonful of clover honey, and brought me a cup of chamomile tea.

"Drink it while it's warm," he said, touching my wrist. "I'll run the humidifier in the bedroom."

At 11:58, I was sitting propped against the pillows with my sketchbook, lining out prong dimensions for an upcoming pendant.

Evan's phone buzzed on the bathroom counter.

He came out with a damp towel around his neck, glanced at the screen, and stepped out onto the back deck.

He pulled the sliding glass door almost shut, leaving a crack the width of a finger.

"I told you I'd look at the numbers," Evan's voice carried through the gap, low and measured. "Get off your feet, Harper. Tomorrow's a long day."

A pause. Then he chuckled--the pleased sound he made whenever someone needed him to fix something.

"Yeah. I've got the chalk and the bands in my truck. Go to sleep."

He hung up, slid the glass door shut, and walked back to the bed.

"Who was that?" I asked, keeping my pencil moving across the paper.

"The sauna circuit tripped again," Evan said smoothly, tossing his phone onto the nightstand. "I told them to leave it until morning."

"Good," I said. "You need to sleep."

He kissed the top of my head and slipped under the sheets.

At 12:38 a.m., the phone buzzed against the wood again.

Evan rolled over, checked the display, and sat up on the edge of the mattress.

"Damn it," he muttered under his breath, scrubbing a hand over his jaw. "The alarm is still going. I need to go deal with it."

He stood up, pulled on his fleece zip-up, and grabbed his keys from the dresser.

He leaned over the bed, his thumb brushing my temple.

"I'll be forty-five minutes. Don't wait up. You need eight hours."

"Be careful driving," I said.

The heavy front door clicked shut behind him. His truck started in the driveway, its headlights sweeping across the ceiling before fading down the street.

After the truck disappeared down the street, I opened Instagram and searched Harper's username.

Her profile was public.

Nothing new was there. I refreshed once, then again.

For thirty-seven minutes, I watched the unchanged grid and listened to the refrigerator hum downstairs.

At 1:20 AM, a new photo appeared on her feed.

It was taken inside Harper's apartment, angled from the floor near the radiator.

Harper's photo had been taken on the studio mezzanine.

She sat beside the whiteboard used for tomorrow's workshop schedule, one hand resting on a stack of Cole Performance intake forms.

Most of the board was out of frame. One line remained visible beneath Evan's dark handwriting.

Women's Workshop - Harper Lane.

The location tag read: Cole Performance Studio.

The caption was short: Some opportunities feel different when the right person opens the door.

I enlarged the photograph until the whiteboard filled my screen.

Harper was not part of the staff. She was not one of our trainers. Until that night, her name had never appeared on a public workshop schedule.

At 1:34 a.m., Tara, the studio operations manager, sent a brief message. She was reviewing the next morning's workshop roster when Harper's new access request appeared in the system. She asked whether I had signed off on it.

I wrote back that I had not.

Tara told me to look at the authorization history before morning.

I opened the administration portal and searched Harper's name.

Harper Lane - Women's Workshop Coordinator

Status: Active

Approved by: Evan Cole

The authorization timestamp loaded beneath her name.

12:46 a.m.

Eight minutes after Evan had kissed my temple and told me he was going out to fix a sauna alarm.

I closed the laptop before I could see what else he had given her.