They went to her apartment together.
Not because she asked him to — she hadn't asked — but because he simply got in the car and drove and she was in the passenger seat and neither of them discussed whether this was appropriate or what it implied.
Garrett was outside her building when they arrived. He looked exactly as calm as he always looked, which had stopped reassuring her and started feeling slightly unnerving.
"No sign of her yet," he said. "But I've got someone watching the front and the car park entrance. If she comes here tonight, we'll know."
"Do you think she'll come here?" Elara asked.
Garrett looked at her honestly. "I think Victoria Ashford is a rational woman who has just watched her entire plan collapse and has been told her blackmail attempt is now part of the criminal case against her. Rational people in that situation do one of two things — they go to ground, or they do something impulsive." He paused. "She is usually very good at not being impulsive. But tonight was the first time she's been impulsive. So I don't know."
They went upstairs.
Elara unlocked the apartment. She turned on the lights. Everything was exactly as she'd left it — her sketchpad on the table, the sunflowers in the kitchen, the tea mug she hadn't washed up.
Callum stood in her hallway and looked around the apartment in the way he'd been doing since the first night he came here — like he was trying to read a language he almost knew.
"Make tea," she said. Because it was something to do.
He went to the kitchen. He found the kettle without being told where it was. She noticed that. She didn't say anything about it.
She sat at the kitchen table. She opened her laptop. She pulled up everything Garrett had sent her in the last hour — Victoria's movements, the timeline, the attorney filing that had created the loophole.
"She's not coming here tonight," Callum said, from the kitchen. He said it with a certainty that surprised her.
"How do you know?"
"Because Victoria doesn't do anything without a purpose. And coming here tonight — when Garrett's watching, when the police are involved, when everything she does is being logged — serves no purpose. It only damages her case." He brought two mugs to the table. "She went to ground. She's reassessing."
Elara looked at him. "You know how she thinks."
"I spent two years with her inside my head," he said, flatly. "Yes. I know how she thinks." He sat across from her. "She'll be back. But not tonight."
Elara closed the laptop.
They drank their tea.
The apartment was quiet around them — not uncomfortably, just quietly, the way it got late at night when the city outside settled into itself.
"You should stay," she said.
He looked at her.
"The sofa," she said. "In case Garrett's wrong." She met his eyes steadily. "Just the sofa."
"I know," he said.
She got him a blanket and a pillow and was very businesslike about it. She showed him where the bathroom was — he already knew, some part of him, but she showed him anyway, for the ordinary ritual of it.
She said goodnight.
She went to her room.
She lay in the dark and listened to the quiet sounds of her apartment — the radiator, the street outside, and the particular silence of not being completely alone — and felt something shift in the architecture of what she'd been building for two years.
She wasn't sure yet whether it was a crack or a door.
She was nearly asleep when she heard it.
Not outside. Inside.
A sound from the kitchen — the specific sound of a drawer opening. Then stopping. Then the low, male sound of Callum saying something she couldn't quite hear.
She was out of bed before she'd fully decided to move.
She opened her bedroom door.
Callum was standing in the kitchen in the dark, holding his phone to his ear, his back to her. He was very still.
"Say that again," he said, into the phone.
A pause.
"When?" he said.
Another pause.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
He hung up. He turned. He saw her in the doorway.
"Garrett," he said. His voice was controlled but his eyes weren't. "Victoria was found at Harmon Medical. She was attempting to access the hospital records server." He paused. "She was specifically trying to delete Dr. Marsh's personnel file and the admission records from the night of the accident."
Elara looked at him.
"She's been arrested," he said.
The kitchen was very quiet.
"It's over?" Elara said.
"The arrest is. The case isn't." He looked at her. "But she's not coming here tonight."
Elara stood in her doorway in the dark and breathed.
"Go back to sleep," Callum said gently.
"Can you?" she asked.
A pause.
"Probably not," he said honestly.
She nodded. She went to the kitchen. She put the kettle on.
They sat together in the quiet kitchen at
two in the morning and waited for the world to settle.