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Whatever the last month of recordings shows, I’m done treating yesterday as a coincidence.
Emma notices the changes before lunch, which doesn’t surprise me. Spencer spent years teaching her to read every room she entered, and that instinct has become part of how she moves through the world.
A receptionist insists on walking her to the executive garage after her morning meeting, the same plainclothes officer crosses her path often enough to draw attention, and a security specialist finds reasons to pass the café while she eats.
Each adjustment makes sense on its own. Together, they tell her I’ve changed the rules.
By the time she reaches my office that afternoon, she’s already pieced enough together to know where the answers are.
She walks in without knocking, closes the door behind her, and looks from the security footage frozen on the conference-room monitor to the exterior camera logs spread across the table before meeting my eyes. “You’ve been busy.”
“I’ve had help.”
Her gaze moves over the screens as she circles the table. “Theo tried very hard to avoid telling me what the two of you were working on this morning. He changed the subject so quickly I knew he was hiding something.”
“He’s never been good at keeping a straight face.”
“He wasn’t today.” She stops with one hand resting against the back of a chair. “I’ve also had a receptionist escort me downstairs, security officers appearing everywhere I go, and my badge suddenly opening doors it didn’t open yesterday.” Her attention settles on me. “What did you change?”
I close my laptop and walk around the desk instead of making her carry the conversation across the room. “I wanted to understand what happened yesterday before I explained it.”
“You wanted the decisions made before I knew about them.”
“I wanted enough information to know what we were dealing with.”
Emma folds her arms across her chest. “You changed plenty while you were looking for it.”
“My priority is keeping you safe.”
“My priority is getting my life back.” She leaves the chair and walks toward the windows overlooking the avenue, putting several feet between us before she turns around. “Yesterday was humiliating. Today I walk into work and everybody acts like I’ll fall apart unless they keep me surrounded.”
“They’re following instructions.”
“Exactly.” Her hand falls against her side. “I finally decide where I go, when I leave work, who I spend time with, and what my days look like. Spencer spent years making those choices because he believed they belonged to him. Yesterday he tried to pull me back into that life, and today I discover you’ve started making decisions for me.”
The comparison lands harder than I want it to because I understand why she’s making it. “I changed the security procedures because Spencer knew when you’d leave this building.”
Her expression shifts slightly. “You said that yesterday could’ve been planned.”
“The photographers were planned. The location was planned. What I can’t explain is the timing.”
I cross to the conference table, pick up the remote, and bring yesterday’s footage onto the monitor. Spencer appears beside the fountain with the bouquet tucked beneath one arm, and I rewind until the timestamp shows his arrival.
“He gets here almost forty minutes before you come downstairs.”
Emma steps closer to the monitor as the footage plays. Spencer checks his watch, looks at his phone, and settles beside the fountain without giving the revolving doors much attention.
“I’ve watched that already,” she says.
“Watch what he pays attention to.”
Her eyes remain on the screen as Spencer checks his watch again. Several people leave the building without drawing more than a passing glance from him, and he keeps waiting until the time approaches the end of Emma’s workday.
Her arms slowly unfold. “He wasn’t watching for me.”
“He was watching the time.”
I change the display to footage from earlier in the week. “Your schedule changes enough that somebody guessing could’ve been standing outside for hours. Spencer wasn’t.”
