“You said you ate.”
“I did.”
“You ate crackers.”
“They count.”
“No, they don’t.”
Elias stopped outside the door. Through the gap, he saw Adeline beside a thin teenage boy propped against a stack of pillows on a sagging couch. The boy’s face was pale, his arms too thin. A small bandage was visible at his wrist.
Adeline unpacked the grocery bag. The boy frowned at the bread.
“You brought food from work again.”
“It was going to be thrown away.”
“That’s what you said last time.”
“And it was true last time.”
“Addie.”
“Ben.”
“You could lose your job.”
Adeline smiled, and it was the tired smile of someone who had already calculated the risk and decided the people she loved were worth more than her own safety.
“Then I’ll find another.”
“You already work twelve hours.”
“Fourteen.”
“That isn’t better.”
She opened the pharmacy bag and held up the small box of dressings. Ben stared at it.
“You bought the cheap ones again.”
“They work.”
“They hurt when you change them.”
“Then complain dramatically. I enjoy your performances.”
The boy laughed — a real laugh, bright in the dim room — and Elias, standing in the hallway with his hand near the weapon he always carried, felt something unfamiliar move in his chest.
He almost stepped away. Almost decided Rourke was wrong, that the cameras had caught an innocent woman in the wrong hallway at the wrong time.
Then he noticed the photograph on the wall.
His entire body went still.
Chapter 3: The Man in the Photograph
A man stood beside a younger Adeline in the picture. Older than her, with the same eyes and the same stubborn set to his smile. Elias knew that face the way a drowning man knows the surface of the water.
Three years earlier, on a rain-soaked street near Boston Harbor, Elias’s SUV had been struck at an intersection and had begun to burn with him trapped inside. A stranger had smashed the passenger window, dragged Elias out through the shattered glass, and pulled him clear seconds before the fuel tank erupted.