Ray Cordero called at nine the next morning, and this time it was Jake who put him on speaker, sitting across the kitchen table from Jordan with a coffee he hadn't touched going cold between his hands.
"Jordan filled me in on the phone call," Ray said, no preamble, his voice carrying the particular flatness of a man who'd spent the previous night reading through everything Jordan had sent him and liking none of it. "I want to be straight with both of you. A threatening call to a private cell number, referencing specific personal history, made from a number that's almost certainly a burner—that's enough for me to open something official. Not a task force. Not yet. But a real file, with my name on it, which means if something happens later, there's already a documented pattern instead of us starting from nothing."
"What do you need from us," Jake asked.
"A written statement from you, today if you can manage it, as close to verbatim as you can remember. And I want the letter and the photograph logged into evidence, not sitting in your nightstand drawer anymore. I know that feels like giving something up. It's not. It's the only way any of this becomes something a prosecutor can eventually use."
Jake looked at Jordan, who nodded slightly, and felt something in his chest tighten at the idea of handing over the photograph—Elise's face, laughing at something outside the frame—into an evidence locker instead of keeping it close the way he'd found himself doing since Thursday night, an object he'd started treating, without quite admitting it to himself, like something he owed her.
"Okay," Jake said. "I'll bring it in."
"One more thing," Ray said, and something shifted in his voice, a carefulness that made Jake sit up straighter. "I pulled a location on that call, best I could manage without a warrant, using a relationship I've got with someone at the carrier who owes me from an old case. It's not exact—burner phones don't give you GPS, just which tower handled the call, which gets you a radius, not a pin. But I want you to hear this from me directly instead of secondhand."
"Okay."
"The tower that handled her call to you last night services a radius that includes your neighborhood, Jake. Not the business park. Not anywhere near that leased unit. Whoever called you last night was within about a mile of your own house when she did it."
The kitchen went very quiet. Jake set his coffee down, hands not quite steady, and felt the specific, crawling horror of understanding that the calm, unhurried voice on the phone last night hadn't been coming from some sealed room three floors below street level, distant and abstract and safe to imagine at arm's length. She'd been close. Close enough to be parked on his own street again, or the next one over, watching the house while she spoke to him, patient and precise, asking him to sit with a sentence he still hadn't fully finished sitting with.
"She was outside," Jake said quietly. "While we were talking. She could have been right outside."
"I don't know that for certain," Ray said. "A mile radius is still a mile radius, that's a lot of houses, a lot of streets. But I'm not going to pretend it isn't closer than any of us would like. I want you thinking about cameras. Doorbell, driveway, anything you can add this week. I also want you thinking hard about whether your family being at that lake house is actually as separate from all this as we're hoping, because a woman resourceful enough to build a shell company and lease a black-market unit in cash isn't a woman I'd assume can't find a change-of-address form or a relative's listed property."
Jake felt the floor tilt slightly under that sentence, some cold certainty settling into his stomach. "You think she could find them."
"I think I'd rather you assume she could and be wrong, than assume she can't and be wrong about that instead." Ray's voice gentled, just slightly. "I'm not trying to scare you worse than you already are. I'm trying to get you thinking like she's thinking, because that's the only way any of us stay ahead of this instead of just reacting to it."
Jordan was already pulling up something on his own phone, jaw tight, the particular focus he got when a new variable had just rearranged the whole shape of a problem he thought he'd already mapped. "I can call Sara's parents. Ask if they've got a security system, cameras, anything. We don't have to tell them everything to ask that much."
"Do it today," Jake said, and heard the rawness in his own voice, the particular fear of a man who had, for one entire day, allowed himself to believe distance had actually meant safety.
• • •
He drove to the police station that afternoon and gave his statement to a woman named Detective Alvarez—no relation, he thought distantly, to the doctor who'd told him, in a life that had un-happened twice over, that his wife hadn't survived—and watched the photograph of Elise get sealed into a clear plastic evidence bag with a chain-of-custody label he made himself read twice, some part of him needing to see, in writing, that she was being taken seriously now, logged and documented and treated like the real thing she was instead of a private grief he alone had been carrying.
He went into the office afterward, later than he meant to, and found Doug waiting in his doorway with the particular impatience of a man who'd stopped extending the benefit of the doubt several days ago.
"Jake. We need to talk about Meridian."
"I know." Jake sat down heavily, the day's weight finally catching up with him all at once. "Doug, I need to come off that account."
Doug's eyebrows went up. "That's not really how this works. Client relationships don't just—"
"I'm asking. I'll explain if you want me to, though I don't think you're going to like the explanation, and I don't think it's going to make either of us comfortable." Jake met his eyes, steady despite everything. "It's a conflict of interest. A serious one. I can't do good work on that account right now, and honestly, I don't think I should be within ten feet of it, professionally or otherwise."
Something in Doug's face shifted, curiosity briefly overtaking irritation. "Is this connected to whatever's had you missing days, showing up looking like you haven't slept?"
"Yes."
"You want to tell me what's actually going on?"
Jake thought about it—the loop, the letter, the photograph now sitting in an evidence bag downtown, Lydia's voice on the phone last night, unhurried and precise, telling him he had a long few weeks ahead of him—and found that he genuinely didn't have the words to compress any of it into something a marketing director would find remotely believable on a Monday afternoon.
"Not really," he said instead. "I'm dealing with something serious in my personal life. It's connected to an old campaign, one from before your time here, and I need to not be near it while I sort this out. That's as much as I can give you right now."
Doug studied him for a long moment, and Jake watched him do the calculation every manager eventually did—weigh the cost of pushing against the cost of losing an employee who'd been reliable for years before whatever this was—and land, finally, on the side Jake had been hoping for.
"Fine," Doug said. "I'll move it to Priya's team. But Jake—whatever this is, get it handled. You're not doing anyone any favors running on fumes, least of all yourself."
"I know," Jake said, and meant it more than Doug could possibly understand.
He drove home that evening to an empty house that still didn't feel like his, the particular echo of Sara and Maya's absence sitting in every room, and sat at the kitchen table with his phone in his hand for a long time before he finally called the lake house, needing to hear both their voices, needing some proof, however temporary, that the distance Ray had just complicated was still, for tonight at least, holding.
Maya picked up on the second ring, breathless with the specific excitement of a six-year-old who'd had an entire day of dock-jumping and s'mores. "Daddy! Grandpa let me steer the boat!"
"Did he now," Jake said, and felt something in his chest ease, just slightly, at the sound of her voice, whole and bright and utterly unaware of a mile-radius cell tower or an evidence bag or any of the quiet architecture of fear her father had spent the entire day building around her. "Was he very brave about it?"
"He closed his eyes the whole time," Maya reported, delighted. "Mommy said he was being dramatic."
Jake laughed, the sound surprising him, genuine despite everything, and asked to talk to Sara, and spent the next twenty minutes not mentioning cell towers or radius estimates or anything that would have put a single crack in the bright, ordinary shape of his daughter's day, telling himself, as he finally hung up, that some kinds of protection were quiet ones, invisible ones, the kind that cost you something and asked for nothing back.
He checked the locks twice before he went to bed. He left every light on the first floor burning through the night, and lay awake a long time listening to the house's ordinary settling sounds, trying and failing to convince himself that any of them were, in fact, ordinary at all.