Chapter 5
"The notifications don't come this way," he said. "They send someone to the door. You know that. You've known that since my father died and they sent someone to the door. You built this whole thing on Emily not knowing."
Victoria said his name again, differently this time.
"She knew," Ryan said. "She told me." He looked at me for the first time since he had come through the door, and the look was the look of a man who has been terrified about something for the last several hours and is now standing in front of the thing he was terrified about and finding it still intact, and the relief in it was not the kind that makes a person collapse but the kind that makes them go very still. "She called me two hours ago. The camera had a live feed."
The camera in my collar had a live feed. Ryan had set it up that way, connected to an app on his phone, with an alert that triggered if the audio level exceeded a threshold for a sustained period. The alert had reached him on a base outside Stuttgart where he had been in a signals blackout for eleven days due to a classified communications issue, which was why the calls had stopped, and the alert had reached him when the communications cleared and he had listened to forty seconds of audio and gotten on the first available transport.
He had been in the air for seven hours.
May you like
He had called me when he landed.
I had answered in the kitchen with Victoria three feet away and Ryan's voice in my ear, and I had talked to the counter in a murmur that Victoria had interpreted as me talking to myself, which was a reasonable interpretation of a pregnant woman who had been told her husband was dead, and Ryan had told me he was twenty minutes out and to keep the camera running.
