Page 19 of The Rook’s Obsession

I set the phone down and look at her again. She hasn’t moved. Her eyes are fixed on a point somewhere on the cabin wall, unfocused, the way people stare when they’re concentrating all their energy on not falling apart.

“Laura.”

“Ivy,” she corrects automatically. But her voice is thin, strained. She doesn’t look at me.

“You’re afraid of flying.”

Her jaw tightens. For a second, I think she’s going to deny it—she denies everything, on principle—but something stops her. Maybe she’s too tired. Maybe the altitude and the enclosed space, and the hum of the engines have worn down her defenses just enough.

“I don’t fly,” she announces, clipped and flat. “I travel by train. Always.”

“How long has it been?”

“How long has what been?”

“Since you’ve been on a plane.”

She’s quiet for a beat. “A long time. Years.”

I stand up and move to the small galley at the front of the cabin. The attendant—a woman in her thirties, who Liam’s people vetted thoroughly—looks up from where she’s been staying pretty much invisible. “Can we get two glasses of wine? Red, if you have it.”

She nods and pulls out a bottle that’s probably worth more than my hotel room in Prague. I carry both glasses back to our seats and set one on the small table next to Laura’s armrest. She looks at it like it might bite her.

“Drink it,” I say, sitting back down across from her. “It’ll help.”

“I don’t need help.”

“You’re about to crack the armrest off your chair, if you don’t crack your teeth with all that clenching.”

She glances down at her hands, seems to realize how hard she’s gripping, and forces her fingers to relax. One by one, deliberately, like she’s manually overriding her own nervous system. Then she picks up the wine and takes a sip. Then a longer one.

I drink mine and wait.

It takes about half a glass before her shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. Her breathing eases from rigid control into something closer to natural. She’s still tense. I doubt this woman has been truly relaxed a single day in her life as Ivy. But the sharp edge of panic is going dull.

She takes another sip and stares at the wine as if it’s personally offended her by being effective. “You remember things about me,” she murmurs.

“I do.” She has no idea, and I won’t bother bombarding her with my memories now.

“Things I loved. Things I hated. How I liked my French fries. Where my birthmark is.” She pauses. “How I used to sleep.”

“All of it.”

“That’s…” She takes another drink, like she’s pulling her courage from the glass. “That’s unnerving. You understand, right? You sit there and talk about my life as if you were in it, and I have nothing. No memories or images, no feelings attached to any of it. It’s like listening to someone describe a movie I’ve never seen.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.” There’s heat in it now, but not the sharp, weaponized kind she usually throws at me. Something rawer. “You look at me, and you see someone you loved, and all of that history informs everything you do. The way you talk to me. The way you touch me.” She swallows. “The way you look at me like I’m supposed to remember.”

“I don’t expect you to remember.”

“Yes, you do,” she insists, and she isn’t wrong. “Every time you tell me something about my past, every little detail you drop like a breadcrumb, you’re watching my face. Waiting for something to click. I’ve seen you do it. The French fries. The birthmark. You’re testing me.”

She’s right. I hate that she’s right, but she is. Every detail I’ve offered—the food, the birthmark, the way she slept—wasn’t just conversation. It was a probe. A careful attempt to trip a wire somewhere in her brain and spark a connection between who she is and who she was.

And she sees right through it, because of course she does. She reads people for a living.

“You’re right,” I admit. “I am.”