s asleep on my sofa. Cloe, what-" "Don't let him out of your sight tonight. Lock the door. I'll explain when I get there." She hung up. Her hands were shaking now, the s

she had built over nine years of managing alone told her to thank him, leave, and handle it herself. And every part of her that was simply exhausted said: let someone help. "I'm not going to quit," she said. "I want you to know that. Whatever this is, I'm not leaving." Something moved through his expression. "I didn't ask you to." "No," she said. "But I wanted to say it out loud. For myself as much as you." * * * She collected Dave from Ada's at nine. He was half asleep, warm and rumpled, and he wrapped his arms around her neck when she lifted him without fully waking. She held him a beat longer than usual. He did not notice. She was glad he did not notice. Ada stood in the doorway and looked at Cloe's face and did not ask questions. She would ask them tomorrow. Tonight she just squeezed Cloe's arm and said come back for breakfast and closed the door. Cloe carried Dave down one flight of stairs and tucked him into his bed and sat on the edge of it in the dark for a while. Listening to him breathe. The specific rhythm of it, the way it evened out in sleep, had been her anchor for nine years. When everything else was uncertain this sound had been the thing she organised herself around. She thought about the photo. The angle of it suggested the person had been standing just outside the school gate, close enough to get his face clearly. Which meant they had known his school. Which meant this was not a spontaneous warning. It had been planned. Someone had taken the time to find out where her son went to school and stand outside it with a phone and document him. Her stomach turned. She went to the kitchen and opened her laptop and sat in the quiet and did what she always did when she could not sleep and could not afford to fall apart. She made a list. What she knew. What she did not know. What she could control and what she could not. She had been making lists like this since Dave was a baby and Marshall's calls started going to voicemail and she had understood, for the first time, that she was probably going to be doing this alone. Lists did not fix things. But they stopped the panic from eating everything. She was still at the table at midnight when her phone lit up. Mac. She stared at his name on the screen for a moment. Then she answered. "I had the number traced," he said without preamble. "It's a burner. Bought two days ago. I'm having the school gate footage pulled. I have a contact." A pause. "I wanted you to know before morning." She closed her eyes briefly. "You didn't have to do that." "I know." The line was quiet for a moment. Not uncomfortable. The kind of quiet that exists between two people who have run out of the words that are safe and have not yet decided whether to say the ones that are not. "How is he?" Mac asked. "Asleep. He doesn't know anything." "Good. Keep it that way