Chapter 4
The only name Tania could think of who might still have contacts in Millbrook was her cousin Jordan, a man she hadn’t spoken to in nearly a decade. She stood outside his front door for a full minute before she found the nerve to knock, smoothing down a dress that suddenly felt too formal for the balloons tied to the mailbox and the sound of children shrieking somewhere behind the house.
A birthday party. She hadn’t known. Jordan’s face, when he opened the door, went through surprise, delight, and then a flicker of something wary before he pulled her into a hug.
“Look at you,” he said. “Come in, come in.”
She stepped into the noise and the smell of cake, and it took her three full seconds to spot Sophia across the yard, a paper party hat perched on her head, laughing at something Jordan’s wife had said.
Tania’s feet stopped moving on their own.
“Dora’s her sister,” Jordan said quietly, following her gaze, an apology already forming on his face. “I should have warned you.”
It was too late for warnings. Caleb was there too, crouched at the edge of the yard helping a small boy blow out sparklers, and something in Tania’s chest cracked at the easy, unguarded way he laughed at whatever the child said to him. She hadn’t heard that laugh directed anywhere near her in longer than she could remember.
She lasted twenty minutes before Sophia found her alone near the drink table.
“You look tired,” Sophia said, tilting her head, her smile never wavering. “Married life not treating you well? It must be exhausting, holding onto a man who’s already gone.”
“Save it, Sophia.”
“I would, but watching you fall apart is the only entertainment I get these days.” Sophia leaned in close enough that Tania could smell her perfume, sickly sweet. “He comes to me at night, you know. Every single time. What does that tell you?”
Tania’s hand found the edge of the table, gripping it hard enough that her knuckles went white.
“Get out of my face.”
“Or what?”
What happened next blurred at the edges even in Tania’s own memory afterward, a shove, a shriek, the sharp crack of Sophia’s heel catching on the patio stone. Sophia went down hard, clutching her ankle and wailing loud enough to summon half the party, and by the time Caleb reached them, his face already twisted with fury, Tania hadn’t said a single word in her own defense.
She didn’t need to. His verdict was already written across his face.
He hauled her out of the party without a goodbye to Jordan, his grip like a manacle around her wrist, and didn’t speak again until they were pulling into the estate driveway.
“Stay away from her. Stay away from the baby.” His knuckles were bloodless on the steering wheel. “Or I will end you, Tania. I mean that.”
She went straight up to her room without answering, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at her own trembling hands until Denise knocked softly and let herself in with a cup of tea neither of them acknowledged out loud was for more than the cold.
“He told me to watch over you,” Denise said quietly, setting the cup down. “Every single day since you got sick. Made me report if you missed a meal.”
Tania looked up sharply, but Denise had already slipped back out, leaving her alone with a piece of information that didn’t fit anywhere she could make it fit.
That night, she called Cecile and let the whole day spill out of her in one long, shaking breath.
“That’s it,” Cecile said, her voice going flat and dangerous in a way Tania had only heard once or twice before. “I’m done watching this happen to you. We’re getting you out. I’ll find a way.”
• • •
Cecile’s way turned out to be her brother’s old college roommate, a lawyer named Norman with an office downtown and, according to Cecile, a crush on Tania that had survived a full decade untouched.
“He still asks about you every time I see him,” Cecile said, steering Tania down a quiet side street toward the coffee shop where they’d agreed to meet. “Don’t look at me like that. He’s a good lawyer, and right now that’s what you need.”
Norman was younger than Tania expected, sharp-suited, with the kind of easy confidence that filled a room before he even spoke. His eyes lingered on her a beat too long when she shook his hand.
“Cecile filled me in a little,” he said, sliding a folder across the table once they sat. “But I want to hear it from you. What exactly is he doing to you?”
The words came slower than Tania expected, each one costing something to say out loud to a stranger, but Norman listened without interrupting, his jaw tightening at certain details, his pen going still against the legal pad more than once.
“We can file today,” he said finally. “Emergency protective order, expedited divorce filing. You don’t have to go back there, Tania.”
She signed where he showed her, her hand steadier than she expected it to be.
Caleb was still in a meeting when the notice arrived on his desk that afternoon. His secretary would later tell Marcus that he read exactly two lines of it before feeding the entire document into the shredder himself, standing over the machine until every page had disappeared.
He called Tania less than ten minutes later.
“Sweetheart, come home.”
The word landed wrong in her ear, too soft, too warm, nothing like the man who had grabbed her by the throat two weeks ago. A chill worked its way down her spine that had nothing to do with her illness.
She went home anyway. She didn’t have anywhere else that felt safer.
The house had changed while she was gone. New doors, heavier, fitted with keypads she didn’t have the code to. A guard stationed just inside the entrance who wouldn’t meet her eyes. Caleb met her in the hallway, plucked her phone straight out of her hand without a word of explanation, and that was that. No calls. No texts. No Cecile, no Norman, no outside world at all.
She should have screamed. Instead, something inside her went very quiet and very still.
“You can lock every door in this house,” she told him that night, her voice low and steady in a way that seemed to unsettle him more than shouting would have, “but you can’t make me stop hating you. If you’re not going to kill me yourself, give me the poison. I’ll do it for both of us.”
Something shifted behind his eyes, quick and involuntary, gone before she could name it.
“Please do that,” he said, low. “You’re more than capable.”
Neither of them moved. For a long moment, the only sound in the room was her own heartbeat, uneven and much too loud in her ears.
• • •
Locked doors, it turned out, made for a strange kind of freedom.
Tania stopped pacing the length of her room on the third day and instead dug her old laptop out from the back of the closet, its battery barely holding a charge, the screen scratched from years of disuse. Her fingers found the keys like they’d never stopped moving over a sketchpad.
She hadn’t designed a single piece of jewelry since the day she dropped out of her program to marry Caleb. Two years of instinct, apparently, didn’t just disappear. The first sketch came out clumsy, her hand rusty, but by the fifth one, something in her chest loosened for the first time in weeks.
She uploaded the collection to a small online marketplace under a username that had nothing to do with her real name, expecting silence.
Instead, her inbox held three messages by morning.
One was from a boutique jewelry house two states over, asking if the artist behind the pieces had more work available, and whether she’d consider a standing contract.
Tania read the email four times before she let herself believe it was real.
The money that came through over the following weeks went straight to Robert’s hospital account, every dollar of it, and for the first time since her diagnosis, she felt like she was building something instead of only losing things.
She messaged Cecile through an old social media account Caleb didn’t know existed, typing quickly, deleting half of what she wrote before settling on something simple. I’m okay. Still here. Don’t worry.
Cecile’s reply came back in seconds, three question marks and a string of concerned emojis, followed by a longer message Tania read twice, her thumb hovering over the screen.
A friend request sat unanswered in her notifications for two full days. Norman.
She left it there, unsure what accepting it would mean, unsure what refusing it would mean either. On the second night, staring at the small profile picture of a man who had looked at her like she was worth fighting for, she pressed accept before she could talk herself out of it.
• • •
The news anchor’s voice drifted from the television in the hallway, something about a business delegation departing for an overseas summit, and Tania nearly dropped the mug in her hand when Caleb’s face flashed across the screen, boarding a private jet.
Gone. For at least a week, according to the reporter.
She was out the front door within the hour, moving faster than her heart probably should have allowed, and didn’t stop until she was standing at her uncle’s bedside, his hand small and papery thin in hers.
“I’m here,” she whispered, though he couldn’t hear her. “I’m still here, Uncle Robert.”
She sat with him for over an hour, talking about nothing, about everything, about the small jewelry business slowly taking shape under a name that wasn’t hers. She still couldn’t reach anyone in Millbrook on her own, every call to the old contact numbers ending in disconnected lines or confused strangers.
Her cousin found out anyway. Jordan showed up at the hospital the next day, guilt written all over his face for what had happened at the party, and offered to help her track down anyone who’d known her mother before she vanished.
“I don’t need you getting dragged into this too,” she told him.
“Too late,” Jordan said. “You’re family. Let me help.”
She was leaving the hospital that afternoon when a voice called her name from across the lobby, familiar in a way that took her a moment to place.
“Tania? Tania Marie?”
Ethan. A boy from her old school who’d sat two rows behind her in every science class for four years, who’d been at the reunion the night everything at the amusement park had started falling apart.
“I heard some things,” he said carefully, once the small talk ran out, his eyes flicking briefly to the faint bruise still fading along her collarbone that her scarf hadn’t quite hidden. “About you and Caleb. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, the lie coming easier now than it had in months.
He didn’t look convinced, but he let it go, and she was still thinking about the concern in his face when she stepped off the curb outside the hospital a few minutes later.
A car horn blared. A silver sedan swerved to a stop inches from her, and the driver’s door swung open.
“Get in,” Norman said, leaning across the passenger seat, “before you actually get yourself killed.”
• • •
Norman took her to a small café two blocks from the hospital, the kind of place with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu, and ordered for both of them without asking, like he’d memorized her old coffee order from a decade ago and never let it go.
“You should let me finish the divorce filing,” he said, once the coffee arrived. “The protective order alone won’t hold forever, Tania. You need this finalized.”
Her fingers traced the rim of her cup. “I’m not doing that anymore.”
Norman set his own cup down slowly. “You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“After everything you told me? Tania, the man threatened your life.” His voice climbed, frustration bleeding through the careful professionalism from before. “Why would you go back to that?”
She didn’t have an answer that would make sense to anyone who hadn’t watched Caleb pull a drowning man’s hand loose from the wreckage of a marriage neither of them knew how to end. She opened her mouth to try anyway.
A chair scraped hard against the floor at the next table.
“Well, isn’t this cozy.”
A woman stood over them, diamond ring flashing as her hand shook with something well past mere anger, and Tania understood the situation a full second before Norman’s face drained of all its color.
“Monica, this isn’t what it looks like—”
“Save it.” Norman’s wife turned her glare on Tania instead, sharp enough to cut. “I don’t know who you are, sweetheart, but you’re about to become very famous online.”
She already had her phone raised, the little red recording light blinking, and Tania felt the whole café tilt sideways beneath her as every head in the room turned to watch.
Two states away, on a private island Tania had never even heard the name of, Caleb sat on the terrace of a villa overlooking turquoise water, a business associate laughing at something on the other end of a video call. His own phone buzzed against the glass table.
An anonymous number. A video attachment.
He almost ignored it. He wished, for the rest of that day, that he had.
Instead, he watched Tania lean across a café table toward a man who was not her husband, watched a stranger’s wife scream accusations at her, watched thirty seconds of footage that told him nothing true and everything he already wanted to believe.
The glass in his hand cracked from how hard his fingers closed around it.
Tania never made it back to her apartment that night. She barely registered the hand that clamped over her mouth as she stepped out of the café, barely registered the car, the plane, the hours that blurred together in a haze of fear and the too-familiar smell of expensive cologne holding her still.
She woke to the sound of ocean waves and Caleb’s voice, cold as the tile beneath her bare feet.
“Welcome to the island,” he said, and threw his phone onto the bed beside her, the video already playing, her own face frozen mid-laugh at whatever Norman had said a lifetime ago in that café. “Your true colors are finally starting to show.”
“Caleb, that is not what it looked like—”
“Like mother, like daughter.” His voice had gone somewhere flat and terrible, somewhere she’d never heard him go before. “Is that your plan? Destroy every home you touch, just like she did?”
Something in Tania finally reached its limit. Two years of accusations, of secrets she didn’t know she was keeping, of a hatred she still didn’t understand the roots of, all of it rose up her throat at once.
“You don’t know anything about my mother!” Her voice cracked down the middle. “You don’t know anything about me! You kidnapped me, Caleb! You had me thrown onto a plane like I was cargo!”
“Because you can’t be trusted anywhere I’m not watching!”
“Because you won’t let me breathe!”
They were both shouting now, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him, could see her own reflection shaking in his eyes, two years of grief and rage finally boiling over into something neither of them had words steady enough to hold.