Caleb opened it. My breath caught in my throat. Inside, nestled in foam, were three passports.
One had my husband’s photo.
One had my son’s.
And the third, with a sickening jolt, had mine.
But as Caleb angled them toward the light, I saw the names printed beneath our faces. None of them were ours.
**Part 2**
I crouched in the suffocating darkness of the attic, dust scratching at the back of my throat, a fine powder of lies and decay. Fear was a physical presence, a heavy weight pressing down on my chest, making each breath a shallow, painful effort. The world I knew had dissolved in the space of ten minutes, replaced by this cold, terrifying reality playing out in the hallway below.
Downstairs, Caleb—or the man I called Caleb—set the passports on the small hallway table with a quiet, decisive click. His movements were efficient, economical, devoid of the familiar, easygoing grace I knew. This was a different person wearing my husband’s skin.
“The Bureau moved faster than we anticipated,” the man in the raincoat said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble.
The Bureau. Mara’s world. My stomach sank, a sickening plummet into a bottomless abyss.
Caleb’s jaw tightened, a small, hard knot of muscle clenching near his ear. “How close are they?”
“Close enough that your wife’s sister may have already been tipped off.”
My sister. **Mara.** The protector, the warrior, the one who lived in the shadows to keep people like me safe in the light. I clutched my dead phone, a useless piece of plastic, and prayed. I prayed for it to light up again with her name, and simultaneously prayed it wouldn’t make a sound and betray my hiding place.
Caleb gestured with his chin toward my laptop. “She never checks anything. She trusts me implicitly. Even if she saw a stray file or an odd transaction, she wouldn’t understand what she was looking at. That’s why I chose her.”
The stranger in the raincoat gave a quiet, humorless laugh. “You chose well.”
Caleb didn’t smile. His face was a mask of grim focus. “Marrying her wasn’t part of the original plan.” For a fleeting, insane moment, I thought I heard a sliver of regret in his voice, a ghost of the man I loved.
Then he added, his voice turning cold as ice, “But the kid complicates things. He always has.”
My vision blurred. A hot, stinging wave of tears threatened to overwhelm me. **Noah.** Our beautiful, four-year-old son, who I believed was sleeping safely miles away at his grandparents’ house. My sweet boy, who loved dinosaur chicken nuggets and demanded three bedtime stories. A complication.
The stranger nodded. “Your parents are already moving him. They have a two-hour head start.”
I bit down on the knuckle of my index finger, so hard I tasted the sharp, metallic tang of blood. They had my son. The kindly, doting grandparents who baked him cookies and bought him noisy toys were part of this nightmare.
Caleb gave a curt nod. “Good. Once we cross the border into Canada, everything resets. We get new identities, a clean slate.”
