Jordan's phone rang at eleven the next morning, a number none of them recognized, and something in the way he went still after the second ring told Jake, before a word had been exchanged, that this call was different from the others.
"This is Jordan," he said, and then, after a pause long enough that Jake could see the exact moment his posture changed, "Who is this."
He mouthed a name across the room, hand half-covering the phone. Reyes.
Jake's stomach dropped. Sara, standing by the window with Maya's swimsuit still damp in her hands from that morning's pool trip, went very still, watching Jordan with the same held-breath focus.
"I need you to say that again slowly," Jordan said into the phone, his voice carefully, deliberately level, the tone Jake recognized from every difficult call he'd ever watched Jordan make—the specific calm designed to keep someone talking instead of hanging up. "Okay. Okay, I hear you. Nobody's calling anyone yet, I promise you that. Just tell me what you need."
He listened for a long moment, jaw tightening, and then said, "There's a diner on Route 9, the Blue Anchor, about ten minutes from where you are if you're calling from that number's area code. Public, cameras inside, always busy at lunch. I can be there in twenty minutes. Alone, like you said. I give you my word."
He hung up and looked at the three of them, something complicated moving across his face—vindication, fear, and underneath both of those, a kind of grim, focused clarity Jake had come to recognize as Jordan fully committing to a problem.
"He's terrified," Jordan said. "Genuinely, I think. He wants to talk. Says he's not going back to her, and he's not going back to his old life either, not until this is over, because he doesn't think either one is safe for him anymore."
"I'm coming," Jake said.
"No. He specifically said alone, and I think if I show up with the one man in this whole situation Lydia's built her entire plan around, he bolts before I get out of the car. I need to go by myself. I'll call Ray from the parking lot before I go in, and I'll call you the second I'm out." Jordan was already pulling on his jacket, keys in hand, the decision made before Jake could fully object to it. "I know how this feels. I need you to trust me on this one."
Jake didn't like it. He said so, and Jordan let him say it, the same patient absorption he'd shown a week and a half of Jake pushing against every piece of careful advice he'd been given, and in the end Jake stayed, because some exhausted, functional part of him had finally learned to recognize when pushing further would cost more than it bought.
• • •
Jordan called an hour and a half later, and Jake had the phone on speaker before it finished its first ring, all three adults gathered around it in the hotel room while Maya napped, worn out from the pool, blissfully unaware of the conversation happening six inches from her sleeping head.
"He talked," Jordan said, and Jake could hear, underneath the words, the particular exhaustion of a man who'd just spent ninety minutes holding himself very carefully still while someone else fell apart across a diner table. "I recorded it, with his permission, on my phone—he wanted it recorded, actually, said he needed there to be a version of this that existed outside his own head where nobody could tell him afterward that he'd imagined it or exaggerated it. I'll get it to Ray properly. But I want to tell you the important parts myself first."
"Go," Jake said.
"He confirms everything. The shell company, the diagnostic letter, the compound during your physical—he wasn't the one who administered it, that was someone else Lydia paid off at the clinic years ago, but he confirms the mechanism, confirms it was real, confirms the timeline lines up with when Lydia first got what she needed to build the loop." A pause, papers shuffling on his end. "He also confirms he was the one at the lake house, and he was the one who broke into my apartment. He's sorry for both, genuinely sorry, in a way I actually believed sitting across from him, though I recognize that's not the same as it mattering legally."
"What made him call," Sara asked. "Why now?"
"Two things. He said after their conversation a few nights ago—the one where he told her he wouldn't touch anything involving Maya—he started noticing surveillance of his own. Someone watching his apartment, a car he didn't recognize outside his building two mornings running. He doesn't know if it was Ray's people or someone else's, but it scared him badly enough that he stopped showing up to his job and started sleeping in a rented room across town under a name that isn't his. He's been running for two days, Jake, not hiding out with her. From her, maybe. From all of it."
"And the second thing," Jake asked, some cold certainty already building in his chest before Jordan finished the sentence.
"The second thing is worse. He says Lydia's operating on a timeline now that has nothing to do with our warrant or our investigation. There's a date. September fourteenth. It's Elise's birthday—she would have turned twenty-nine. He says Lydia's talked about it, obliquely, more than once, in ways that made him increasingly uneasy the closer it got. He doesn't know exactly what she's planning to do by then. He says he doesn't think she fully knows either, not with certainty, that some of it is still improvised the way the lake house was. But he's certain there's a deadline in her head, and he's certain it isn't a coincidence that it lands on that date."
Jake did the math without wanting to, the calendar in his head flipping forward with a sick, mechanical certainty. September fourteenth was eleven days away.
"That's before the warrant," Sara said, quiet, her hand finding Jake's without either of them looking away from the phone. "Ray said two or three days for the warrant. That's—we have time, don't we? We have more than enough time."
"We have time for the warrant," Jordan said carefully. "I don't know if we have time for whatever she's actually planning to do with the days after it. I don't think Simon knows either, and I don't think that's him withholding anything—I think it's because she genuinely hasn't finished deciding, and that's almost more frightening than if she had. A plan you can predict. A woman still actively building one, this close to a date that means everything to her, is a lot harder to stay ahead of."
Jake closed his eyes, Sara's hand tight in his, the sound of Maya's slow, even breathing from the bed behind them the only steady thing in the room.
"Is he willing to talk to Ray? Officially. On the record."
"He said yes, eventually, though he wants some kind of protection guarantee first, which I think is fair given everything he's just handed us. I'm bringing him to the station myself this afternoon. Ray's already clearing time." Jordan's voice softened, just slightly, some of the case-file precision giving way to something more human underneath it. "We got a real break today, Jake. A scared man walked away from her and toward us instead, which is not nothing, even with everything else sitting on top of it. I need you to hold onto that part too."
Jake opened his eyes, looked at Sara, at Maya asleep and unaware six inches from a conversation that had just handed them both a countdown and a reason for hope in the same breath, and thought about a date eleven days out that a grieving woman had built, somewhere in the wreckage of the last four years, into the shape of an ending.
"Eleven days," he said quietly, mostly to himself. "We have eleven days to make sure whatever she's planning never happens."