Chapter 10 - FOUR MILES AWAY
Police cars arrived without sirens.
Aaron turned off every downstairs light while Melissa took Ruby upstairs.
I stood in the kitchen wearing borrowed sweatpants and watched officers move through the dark backyard.
My body remembered fear differently than my mind did.
In the ring, fear had edges.
A bell sounded.
An opponent stood in front of you.
Rounds ended.
Rules existed.
This fear had no edges.
Gregory could be outside.
Or ten miles away.
Or reading about the police response from another phone while we imagined him behind every parked car.
Agent Reed arrived twenty minutes later.
"His car was recorded at 8:41 p.m."
"Where is it now?"
"We don't know."
"License plate readers lost it after it turned into a residential area."
Aaron's face tightened.
"Could he know Claire is here?"
Reed looked at me.
"Who knows?"
"Marisol."
"My office."
"Natalie knows I left the condo but not the address."
"A few relatives."
Aaron said, "Gregory has been here before."
We all turned toward him.
"Christmas dinner last year."
"He knows exactly where I live."
That settled it.
Police recommended moving me again.
This time I did not argue.
Federal investigators arranged temporary secure lodging because Gregory was now a fugitive connected to a broader fraud case and credible threats.
I left Aaron's house through the garage beneath a coat that was not mine and climbed into an unmarked vehicle.
The absurdity hit me halfway down the highway.
Three weeks earlier, I had been choosing thank-you cards for wedding gifts.
Now I was being relocated because my husband might have considered my death a financial strategy.
At the secure apartment, I finally broke.
Not dramatically.
No screaming.
No throwing things.
I sat on the bathroom floor and cried so quietly that I could hear the refrigerator cycling on in the next room.
I cried for the marriage.
I cried for the version of myself who had trusted him.
I cried because strangers online thought my boxing made me invulnerable.
I cried because I had been strong enough to stop his hand and still not strong enough to prevent the betrayal that came before it.
Marisol came the next morning with coffee and clean clothes Melissa had packed.
She did not tell me to be strong.
She sat on the sofa and waited until I spoke.
"I keep replaying the wedding."
"That's normal."
"Every smile feels fake now."
"Some of them probably were."
I looked at her.
"That's a terrible comforting statement."
"I'm a terrible comfort lawyer."
I laughed unexpectedly.
It helped.
Then she became serious.
"The annulment court granted temporary relief."
"The marriage is not formally annulled yet, but Gregory is barred from claiming any interest in the condo or accessing marital property pending review."
"Good."
"His civil case against you is also likely to be dismissed."
"Good."
"And your company called me."
That made me tense.
"Why?"
"They want to restore you to client work."
"The general counsel reviewed the video and filings."
"They are also preparing a statement that your employment status was never disciplinary."
I exhaled.
One piece of my life was coming back.
Then Reed called.
Gregory's car had been found in a supermarket parking structure.
Abandoned.
Inside were two prepaid phones, a change of clothes, and a printed map.
The map had circles drawn around three addresses.
My condo.
Aaron's townhouse.
Natalie's home in Richmond.
I called Natalie immediately.
Federal agents were already with her.
She sounded shaken but safe.
"Why me?" she whispered.
I knew the answer.
"Because he thinks you're helping build the case."
"I am helping."
"Then keep helping from behind locked doors."
She laughed weakly.
"You too."
The third address changed the investigation from locating a fugitive to preventing potential attacks on witnesses.
Gregory's photograph circulated nationwide.
Airports, train stations, border crossings, and rental car agencies received alerts.
He had money.
He had access to forged documents through Victor's network.
And he knew how investigators worked because Diane had spent years paying lawyers to study the edges of systems.
For six days, there was nothing.
Then someone used one of Victor's dormant business identities to rent a storage unit in Maryland.
The renter presented a driver's license with Gregory's photograph and another man's name.
Agents obtained a warrant.
Inside the unit they found boxes of documents, several old phones, cash, and a locked metal case.
Reed called me after the search.
His voice was controlled.
"We found photographs."
"Of what?"
"Women."
"Some appear to be surveillance photographs."
My chest tightened.
"Me?"
"Yes."
There were pictures of me leaving work.
Pictures of me at the gym.
Pictures of me walking with Aaron.
Pictures of me visiting my mother's grave.
One photograph dated eighteen months before I met Gregory.
I stared at Reed.
"That's impossible."
"You told us you met him eleven months ago."
"I did."
"Then he knew who you were before you knew who he was."
The relationship had not begun at a restaurant because he happened to sit beside me while waiting for a table.
That was the story I had cherished.
Two strangers.
One rainy Friday.
A conversation that lasted three hours.
The photograph proved it had been staged.
Gregory had watched me for at least seven months before introducing himself.
"Why me?"
Reed placed another document on the table.
It was an obituary.
My mother's obituary.
Someone had highlighted the sentence naming me as her only surviving child.
Next to it was a handwritten note.
HOUSE + PORTFOLIO LIKELY SOLE HEIR.
I felt something inside me harden.
He had found me through death.
My mother's obituary had advertised an inheritance to a predator.
I was no longer heartbroken over a man I had lost.
I was grieving a man who had never existed.
Reed opened the locked metal case.
Inside, investigators had found something even more disturbing.
A wedding invitation.
Not mine.
The names printed on it were Gregory Halvorsen and a woman named Rebecca Cole.
The date was six months in the future.
Gregory had been planning another wedding before ours was even over.
The discovery that Gregory had watched me before we met damaged one of my favorite places in the city.
The restaurant where he introduced himself had been a place I visited after difficult workweeks.
For months after learning the truth, I could not imagine walking inside again.
Then Marisol suggested something that sounded almost aggressive.
"Go there without him."
"Why?"
"Because the building didn't betray you."
I resisted.
Eventually Aaron came with me.
We sat at a different table.
The same hostess still worked there.
She did not recognize me until I mentioned the old reservation system.
Then she remembered Gregory.
"He came in earlier that night," she said.
My chest tightened.
"How much earlier?"
"Maybe an hour."
"He asked whether bar seats opened often."
That tiny detail confirmed what the surveillance photograph had already shown.
The meeting was staged down to timing.
I expected the confirmation to hurt.
Instead, it removed the last accidental romance from the story.
There was freedom in having nothing left to defend.
Aaron and I ordered dessert.
I paid.
When we left, I looked back at the restaurant windows.
The place no longer belonged to Gregory's version of our beginning.
It became simply a restaurant again.
Small acts of reclamation began adding up.
A street.
A recipe.
A gym.
A memory.
I could not undo what he staged.
I could stop letting the stage remain occupied forever.
During the days I stayed in secure lodging, I had no access to most of my familiar possessions.
The apartment was clean and anonymous.
White walls.
Neutral furniture.
Generic dishes.
A framed photograph of a beach I had never visited.
At first the impersonality made me feel displaced.
Then it became strangely comforting.
Nothing in the apartment had a memory attached to Gregory.
I could sit on the sofa without remembering where he once sat.
I could open a cabinet without wondering whether he had searched it.
For a few days, anonymity felt like rest.
I worked from a small desk beside the window.
My employer gave me a reduced client load and internal modeling projects that required concentration but little public contact.
Numbers became a bridge back to myself.
I reviewed cash-flow projections, corrected assumptions, and argued with a spreadsheet that did not lie because it wanted something from me.
One afternoon, I caught myself humming while working.
The sound startled me.
It had been weeks since music emerged without intention.
That evening, I called my therapist and told her the humming felt like evidence.
"Of what?" she asked.
"That my brain did something besides scan for danger today."
She agreed that counted.
I began keeping a second list beside the legal timeline.
Not threats.
Normal things.
A good cup of coffee.
Forty minutes of uninterrupted work.
A joke from Aaron.
Sleeping five hours without waking.
Eating because I was hungry rather than because someone reminded me.
The list looked childish compared with Project Sable.
It became more important.
The legal case measured what Gregory had done.
The second list measured what he was no longer doing.
When agents found the surveillance photograph from before our meeting, I added another entry that night.
I went to bed without blaming myself for not detecting a stranger who had deliberately arranged to become familiar.
That was progress too.
Reed once asked whether I wanted to see all the surveillance photographs from the storage unit.
I said no.
Months earlier, I would have demanded every image.
By then, I understood that information could become another form of captivity if I consumed it without purpose.
I asked him to show me only what mattered legally or for safety.
The rest could remain evidence without becoming memory.
May you like
Choosing not to know everything was one of the first freedoms I exercised deliberately.
