Jordan made the call from the kitchen table, on speaker, at Jake's insistence, because Jake had reached a point where being kept slightly outside of things felt worse than whatever he might have to hear.
"Ray. It's Jordan Parker." A pause, some rustle of the other end adjusting to the hour, the day, whatever Saturday morning Ray Cordero had been having before his phone rang. "I know it's been a while. I need a favor, and I need to be straight with you up front that it's not really a favor I'm supposed to be asking anymore, given my current employment situation."
"You still owe me a fishing trip from the Hendricks case," a voice said, gravel-rough, amused despite itself. "What's going on."
Jordan laid it out with the same careful, load-bearing precision he'd used on Jake three nights ago in his own apartment—dates, filings, the shell company, the note, the photograph, all of it delivered without embellishment, the facts allowed to carry their own weight instead of being dressed up to sound more urgent than they already were. He left out the time loop entirely. Jake noticed that, and was grateful for it, and understood without being told that Jordan had made a calculated choice about which parts of the truth would get them taken seriously and which would get the whole thing filed under needs a psych eval before Ray had finished his coffee.
There was a long quiet on the other end when Jordan finished.
"That's a real stalking pattern," Ray said finally. "The note alone, if you can produce it, that's harassment at minimum, maybe worse depending on how a DA wants to read the language in it. But you know as well as I do a leased commercial unit and a shell company aren't enough for a warrant. I can't kick a door on a hunch, even a good one."
"I'm not asking for a door," Jordan said. "I'm asking you to drive by. Off the clock, no report filed yet, just tell me if that unit looks occupied. Lights, deliveries, anything. I need eyes that aren't mine, because mine currently come with a compliance investigation attached, and I don't want to hand anyone a reason to throw out something real because of how it got found."
Another pause, shorter this time. "I can do that. I'm not promising it turns into anything more than a drive-by and a look. If I see something that gives me actual cause, I'll act on it properly, through the front door, paperwork and all. I'm not going to freelance this for you, Jordan, I like my pension."
"That's all I'm asking."
"I can swing by this afternoon. I'll call you either way." A beat. "This the friend's situation you mentioned the other day, when you asked me about researching someone off the books?"
Jordan's eyes flicked to Jake across the table, something passing over his face too fast to fully read. "Yeah. It's exactly that."
• • •
They hung up, and the kitchen sat quiet for a moment, the three of them absorbing the particular anticlimax of having done something and still having to wait, and it was Sara who finally said the thing Jake had been turning over since breakfast and hadn't found a way to start.
"I think Maya and I should go to my parents' for a few days."
Jake looked up at her. "You said we weren't doing this separately anymore."
"I meant the fear. The decisions. I didn't mean Maya has to sit in the blast radius while we figure out how big it actually is." Sara's voice was steady, but he could see what it cost her to keep it that way, her hands wrapped tight around her coffee mug like it was the only warm, solid thing left in the room. "My parents are three hours away. Nobody's followed a shell company's paperwork out to a lake house in the middle of nowhere. I can keep her safe there in a way I can't keep her safe here, not with a woman leaving envelopes in our mailbox at midnight."
"I don't want you three hours away either," Jake said, and heard, even as he said it, how much of that was fear for himself rather than logic. "I want everyone where I can see them."
"I know." Sara reached across the table, covered his hand with hers. "But that's not actually the same thing as everyone being safe, is it. That's you needing to see us to feel okay. I love you for it. I don't think it's the right call for Maya."
Jordan, who had been quiet through this, watching them with the particular careful neutrality of a man who knew this wasn't his conversation to referee, finally spoke. "For what it's worth, I think Sara's right. Not because I want you two apart. Because a woman who's already shown she'll come to your mailbox at midnight is a woman I don't want anywhere near your daughter while we're still working with an address and no confirmation. Distance isn't giving up. It's triage."
Sara's eyes were wet when Jake finally nodded, some tight coil in his chest loosening and tightening at the same time, relief and grief arriving together the way they seemed to for everything now.
"I'll drive them up this afternoon," he said. "I want to see the house. I want to know exactly where she's sleeping."
"Okay," Sara said softly. "Okay."
They told Maya it was a surprise visit to Grandma and Grandpa's, which required no real performance of enthusiasm on anyone's part because Maya's love for her grandparents' lake house was entirely genuine and required no cover story to explain, and by one o'clock they were loaded into the car, Mr. Buttons buckled into the middle seat beside her with his own small assigned dignity, and pulling out of the driveway into a gray, ordinary Saturday afternoon that gave no outward sign of anything at all.
Jake watched the street the entire drive, in every mirror, at every light, the particular vigilance that had become so constant over the last several days that he sometimes forgot it hadn't always been there. Nothing followed them. No gray sedan, no unfamiliar car holding steady three cars back, nothing but ordinary traffic thinning out as the highway left the city behind and gave way to the kind of long, quiet roads that made a man's hands finally, slowly, start to unclench on the wheel.
Sara's parents met them in the driveway of the lake house with the easy, uncomplicated warmth of people who had no idea anything was wrong, and Jake let himself watch, for a few minutes, Maya running the length of the dock with her grandfather chasing lazily behind her, and felt something in his chest ache with a tenderness so total it was almost indistinguishable from grief.
His phone buzzed in his pocket as he stood there. Jordan.
Ray called. Unit's occupied. Lights on a timer, at minimum, or someone's actually there—can't tell which from the street. Delivery van pulled up while he was watching, dropped a package at the loading door around back. He couldn't get close enough to see who signed for it without making himself obvious.
Jake read it twice, the ordinary sound of Maya's laughter carrying up from the dock behind him, and felt the two halves of his life—the one where his daughter existed in a world made entirely of docks and lake water and grandparents, and the one where a woman he'd never met was building a case against him one careful, patient move at a time—sit uneasily side by side in his chest, refusing, no matter how hard he tried, to fully separate from each other.
He typed back a single word. Occupied. He stared at it for a long moment before he added the rest.
So she's real. She's actually there. Now what?
The reply took a minute to come, long enough that Jake had time to watch Maya do a cannonball off the end of the dock, shrieking with the specific, uncomplicated delight of a six-year-old who had no idea her father was standing forty feet away deciding how close he was willing to get to the person who wanted to hurt her.
Now we do this carefully, Jordan wrote. I know that's not the answer you want. It's the only one I've got that doesn't end with someone getting hurt who doesn't need to be.