You let out the faintest laugh. “Wedding brain.”
Carmen reaches to adjust a strand of your hair with such intimate, maternal confidence you have to stop yourself from stepping back. “That’s why you have us. We’ll take care of everything.”
Yes, you think.
I know.
That night, after they leave, you lock the apartment door, turn off the kitchen light, and sit alone at the dining table in the dark.
The city outside your windows is all glitter and traffic, the glow of Chicago spread out in hard silver lines beneath an early spring sky. You do not cry. Not yet. Crying would mean collapsing into the emotional truth of what happened, and your mind is not ready for grief while danger is still moving.
Instead, you open your laptop.
First, you search your property records.
Then your banking access.
Then the prenuptial draft Daniel kept “forgetting” to finalize because, he said, love shouldn’t start with suspicion.
Of course.
Suspicion was supposed to be your part in the story, introduced later, when it would sound insane.
By midnight, you know enough to understand two things. First, the apartment is still legally ironclad in your name, untouched. Second, Daniel has been steadily positioning himself around your finances in small, supposedly loving ways. Joint wedding expenses. Suggestions about combining investment advisors. Casual remarks about how exhausting it must be for you to manage everything alone. Each move was subtle, deniable, almost tender on the surface.
You were not engaged.
You were being softened for extraction.
At 12:43 a.m., you call the only person you know who will not waste time telling you to calm down.
Her name is Nora Blake. You met her four years ago when her firm handled a zoning dispute for one of your projects, and you liked her immediately because she had the eyes of a person who had seen too many polished lies to ever trust charm again. She answers on the third ring sounding sleepy and annoyed, which is how you know she is listening carefully.
