Cole looked up from her notes.
“How many women?” I repeated.
There was a pause that lasted exactly long enough to tell me the answer was worse than one.
“Diana Flores was his wife,” Cole said. “They married in Phoenix three years ago.” She spoke like someone reciting a case file, but there was something careful in her tone, an awareness that she was handing me a grenade. “She filed a missing person report eight months into their marriage. The assets were gone. So was he.”
My breath came shallow. The fluorescent light buzzed above us.
I set the photograph down very carefully, like it might cut me.
The water bottle sat between us, untouched. I reached for it—not because I was thirsty, but because I needed something to do with my hands. The cap resisted. My fingers fumbled. Cole slid it closer without comment, and the small kindness of that made my throat burn.
I forced the cap open. I took one sip. The water tasted like plastic and distance.
For a long moment, I just sat there while my understanding of the last four years quietly restructured itself, beams shifting, supports cracking, everything I’d built in my mind re-forming into something unrecognizable.
Reyes didn’t fill the silence. I appreciated that more than he knew. Silence, at least, gave me space to think.
“Diana Flores,” I said finally. The name felt like a stone in my mouth. “Where is she now?”
“Phoenix,” Cole said. “She rebuilt. Took about two years.” Her voice carried something I couldn’t name at first—not pity, exactly. Respect, maybe. A specific kind of respect reserved for people who survived something that should have broken them.
“And there are others,” I said. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact, because patterns don’t stop at one.
Reyes nodded once. “We’ve identified two additional women across three states,” he said. “Different names he used, different industries he claimed to work in. The logistics consulting, the travel, the slow, careful courtship. It’s methodology.”
Methodology. Like he was running a business.
Reyes’s gaze didn’t waver. “He’s exceptionally good at reading what a woman needs to believe,” he said.
That sentence landed somewhere deep, like a hook.
What had I needed to believe?
That someone patient and steady had chosen me.
That four years of consistency meant something permanent.
That I had finally been careful enough.
Reyes leaned back slightly, softening his tone without turning it into comfort. “He hasn’t broken any laws yet in your case,” he said. “You married yesterday. No financial movement has occurred that we’ve detected.”
“Which means…” I whispered, and the thought formed with surgical clarity, “…I’m still ahead of it.”
Reyes nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “If you’re willing to help us.”
My stomach turned, but not from nausea. From instinct. A line had been drawn in my life, and I could feel the shape of the decision waiting on the other side.
“If you say no,” Cole said, voice even, “we release you. He boards his connection, and we continue building the case the slow way.”
Reyes folded his hands. “But the slow way,” he said gently, “means another woman after you. Maybe two.”
I hated how effective that was. I hated that they knew exactly which button to press inside me—the part of me that couldn’t stand to watch someone else get hurt when I could do something.
In my head, I saw Diana Flores rebuilding her life in Phoenix, two years of picking up pieces that someone had scattered. I imagined other women, unknown and unnamed, still living in the illusion I had lived in until an hour ago.
I imagined Marcus in the terminal right now, relaxed, scrolling his phone, completely unbothered.
That unbothered quality. I had always read it as confidence.
“Okay,” I said quietly, and my voice sounded like it belonged to someone older. “What do you need from me?”
They needed forty-eight hours.
That was the number Reyes put on the table, like a deadline, like a countdown. Forty-eight hours of me behaving as though nothing had changed. Flying to Cancún. Checking into the resort. Smiling at a man whose last name I had taken yesterday and whose real history I was only now beginning to understand. Sleeping next to him. Eating breakfast with him. Letting him touch me without letting my skin crawl.
“We can’t move without documentation of intent,” Cole explained. “What he’s done to other women exists in other jurisdictions. What he does to you happens here under our watch. We need him to initiate the financial piece. One transaction. That’s all.”
“One transaction,” I repeated, trying to keep my voice steady.
Reyes nodded. “If he initiates, if he moves assets or attempts to move them in a way that meets the threshold, we can arrest him with a clean case.”
“And if he doesn’t?” I asked.
“Then we keep watching,” Reyes said. “But we’re fairly certain he will.”
Because that’s what predators do, I thought. They don’t change their teeth because the next meal looks different.
“He’s going to wonder why I took so long at security,” I said, because the practical part of me needed details, steps, something to hold onto.
“We’ve already handled that,” Cole said, and for the first time her mouth almost curved. “Customs flag. Cleared. He’ll have received a text notification. We’ve done this before.”
Of course they had.
I picked up the photograph again and looked at Marcus’s hand on Diana’s back. I thought about how I’d watched his hand rest on my back in wedding photos, the same angle, the same possessive tenderness.
The difference was that I’d believed it meant something.
“Forty-eight hours,” I said again.
Reyes slid a small phone across the table. “Secondary device,” he said. “Only one contact is saved. Use it only for this. Document anything he initiates regarding finances. Paperwork, transfers, beneficiary updates—anything. Photograph it. Record if you can.”
I stared at the phone. It looked ordinary. It felt heavy.
“What happens if he realizes?” I asked.
Reyes’s eyes sharpened. “Then we pull you out,” he said. “You’re not bait if you’re in danger, Mrs. Weston. But we need you to stay calm and stay smart. You already are.”
I didn’t feel calm. I didn’t feel smart. I felt like someone had reached into my chest and rearranged my ribs.
But I nodded.
They walked me out through the same hallway, the airport noise rushing back in when the door opened, loud and absurd. People rolled suitcases. Children cried. A woman argued with an airline agent about a seating assignment. The world continued as if nothing had happened.
Marcus was exactly where I expected him to be.
Corner seat, facing the gate. Coffee in hand. When he saw me walking toward him, his face arranged itself into concern so naturally that for a split second my body responded the old way, with relief, with the instinct to lean into him.
Then I remembered the photograph, and my stomach tightened.
“They held you that long for a random check?” he said, standing up, reaching for me. His fingers touched my cheek, warm, familiar.
I kept my smile in place like a mask. “Apparently my passport flagged something,” I said. “Old issue from a work trip.”
I had rehearsed it in the elevator. It came out clean.
Marcus’s eyes searched mine for a microsecond. Something flickered—evaluation, perhaps. Then his expression softened again.
“That’s insane,” he said, shaking his head like he was outraged on my behalf. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just want to get on the plane.”
He kissed my forehead. I let him.
On the flight, Marcus fell asleep quickly, the way he always did when he was confident in the shape of the day. His head tilted toward the window, his mouth slightly open, his hand resting on his thigh with the casual abandon of someone who believed the world was safe for him.
I watched him sleep for three hours over the Gulf of Mexico and studied the architecture of his face the way you examine something you thought you understood and are now measuring differently.
His eyelashes were thick. There was a faint scar near his jaw that he’d once told me came from a childhood bike accident. His brow was smooth, untroubled, the face of a man with no conscience—or an exceptionally well-trained one.
The wedding band on his finger caught the cabin light.
Mine felt suddenly heavy.
In my carry-on, tucked beneath my toiletry bag, was the secondary phone Cole had given me. One contact saved. No name, just a number. A thread back to truth.
I wanted to cry. Not in a dramatic way. In the quiet way you cry when something inside you has died and you’re the only one who knows it.
Instead, I stared at the seatback in front of me and made myself breathe.
I thought about the first time I’d met Marcus.
It had been at a fundraiser for a local literacy program, one of those events you go to because a friend asked and you can’t find a polite excuse not to. I’d been standing near a table of silent auction items, pretending to be interested in a weekend spa package, when Marcus had appeared beside me with a glass of sparkling water.
“Are you bidding on that?” he’d asked, nodding at the spa package.
“No,” I’d said honestly. “I’m considering how much guilt I’d feel if I won it and never used it.”
He’d laughed. Not too loud. Not performative. Just real amusement.
“That’s an answer only a careful person would give,” he’d said.
I’d looked at him then—tall, neatly dressed, eyes attentive in a way that didn’t feel invasive. Most men at fundraisers like that were either bored or hunting. Marcus had seemed… present.
“What’s careful supposed to mean?” I’d asked.
