It wasn’t the guilty glance of a child hiding a broken toy.
It was fear.
“Fiona,” I said carefully. “Has Grandma done something that frightened you?”
She shook her head far too quickly.
Outside, my driver tapped the horn.
I ignored him.
Fiona leaned closer and gripped the table edge until her knuckles whitened.
“Daddy, don’t go to Chicago.”
I knelt beside her. “Tell me why.”
Tears gathered in her eyes. “Grandma takes me somewhere when you’re gone.”
My chest tightened. “Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“She makes me lie down in the back seat first.”
For a moment, all I could hear was my heartbeat.
Fiona dropped her voice even lower. “She says it’s our secret place. She says if I tell you, Mommy will get hurt and it’ll be my fault.”
Everything inside me went still.
I kissed Fiona’s forehead, stood, and called my pilot. “Mechanical delay,” I said. “Cancel today’s flight.”
Then I sent my driver away as though nothing had changed.
Nobody else in the house knew I was staying.
Two hours later, I watched through an upstairs window as Wendy led Fiona toward her SUV. I waited thirty seconds, grabbed the keys to an old Range Rover the family rarely used, and followed at a distance.
Wendy drove beyond downtown Greenwich.
Then beyond the roads I knew.
