The hotel Ray recommended sat off the highway on the north side of the city, unglamorous and forgettable in exactly the way that made it useful—a chain business hotel with keycard-only floor access, a front desk staffed around the clock, and a parking structure with cameras at every entrance, the kind of place nobody would think to look for a family hiding from anything, because nothing about it looked like a place worth hiding in.
Maya found it, against every reasonable expectation, delightful.
"There's a pool," she announced, the first night, bouncing on the second of the two double beds with an energy Jake envied and couldn't remotely access himself. "And room service. Mommy, can we get room service every single night?"
"We'll see," Sara said, and caught Jake's eye over their daughter's head, the particular exhausted, grateful look of two parents managing, together, to keep a six-year-old from feeling the true shape of what they were actually doing.
They'd told her it was an adventure. A hotel vacation, a break from the lake house, a chance to swim in an indoor pool with a waterslide that Maya had already claimed as the best part of her entire summer, and the lie sat easier with Jake than he'd expected it to, because some part of it wasn't even a lie—he wanted this, badly, wanted one uncomplicated thing to give his daughter in the middle of everything else, wanted her to remember this stretch of her life, whenever she was old enough to understand what had actually been happening around her, as the time she got to swim every day instead of the time her father had been afraid to let her out of his sight.
Jordan called a little after nine, once Maya had finally worn herself out and gone still against Sara's side, half-asleep in front of a cartoon neither adult was watching.
"Can you talk?" His voice had an edge to it Jake didn't like.
Jake stepped into the hallway, pulling the door mostly shut behind him. "What happened."
"Someone got into my apartment today. I was out most of the afternoon dealing with the union rep, paperwork for the compliance hearing, and when I got back the door was locked, nothing obviously disturbed, except—" a short, humorless breath, "—except I keep a go bag habit from an old case, small stuff moved half an inch from where I always leave it. Most people wouldn't notice. I notice. Somebody was in my apartment today, Jake, and they were careful enough that if I didn't have the specific paranoia of a claims investigator, I never would have known."
"Did they take anything?"
"That's the part I don't love. My personal laptop's still here, untouched as far as I can tell. But the external drive I kept the case files on—photos, the plate lookup, the shell company documents, all of it—it's gone. Not hidden somewhere I misplaced it. Gone. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were looking for and exactly where a guy like me would keep it."
Jake felt the hallway tilt slightly under him, one hand going flat against the wall. "You said you backed everything up somewhere else too."
"I did. Cloud storage, encrypted, nothing that was sitting in my apartment waiting to be lifted. That's still intact, I checked the second I realized the drive was gone. We haven't lost the case. But we've lost the illusion that my apartment was any safer than your house was, and I've lost a full day rebuilding my sense of where it's actually safe to work from now." A pause. "I called Ray already. He's sending someone to process it properly—prints, if we're lucky, though I'm not holding my breath given how careful everything else about this has been."
"This isn't Lydia doing her own break-ins," Jake said slowly, working through it out loud. "She wouldn't risk it herself, not with a case already building."
"No. I don't think it's her personally. I think it's the guy Ray photographed going into that unit before she did—the one with the equipment cases. I think she's got at least one person doing the physical work now, which changes things. It means anywhere I am, anywhere you are, isn't just a location on a map to her anymore. It's a location somebody's actually willing to go stand inside."
Jake closed his eyes, leaning his head back against the hallway wall, the low hum of the hotel's ventilation system the only sound besides Jordan's breathing on the other end of the line. "Come stay with us. Here, at the hotel. I don't want you alone in that apartment tonight, or any night until this is actually finished."
"I was hoping you'd say that, honestly, though I wasn't going to ask." Some of the edge went out of Jordan's voice, just slightly, replaced by something more tired, more human. "I don't love what it says about where we've all ended up. Four adults and a kid, camped out in a hotel because a grieving scientist and whoever she's recruited have made every ordinary place in our lives feel like it's got eyes on it."
"Four adults?"
"Ray's coming by too, off the clock, just to walk the floor and make sure the hotel's security is actually what it advertises itself as. He offered. I didn't ask him to, and I think that tells you something about how seriously he's taking this now that it's touched two houses and an apartment inside a week."
Jake let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, something in his chest loosening a fraction at the idea of all of them, finally, under one roof, watched over by people who actually knew what they were watching for. "Bring whatever you've got left. The drive, the laptop, all of it. I don't want anything sitting anywhere alone anymore, evidence included."
"On my way. Give me forty minutes."
Jake ended the call and stood in the hallway a moment longer, looking at the closed door of the room where his wife and daughter sat curled together in the blue light of a cartoon, safe for now, watched over for now, in a beige, forgettable hotel that had somehow, in the space of a single week, become the safest place either of them could imagine being.
He thought about Lydia's voice on the phone four nights ago, unhurried and precise. You have a long few weeks ahead of you either way. He thought about a man with equipment cases standing in a parking lot, and the same man, or someone like him, standing quiet and careful in Jordan's apartment today, moving a go bag half an inch and taking exactly what mattered and nothing else.
She's not improvising anymore, he thought, pushing off the wall, heading back toward the door. She's building a team. And we're the only people who seem to have noticed.
He went back inside, locked the door behind him, and sat down on the edge of the bed beside his sleeping daughter, one hand resting lightly on her back, feeling the small, steady rise and fall of her breathing, and made himself a private, silent promise that he had no earthly idea yet h ow he was going to keep.