The last day of the contract was a Sunday.

Iris knew it when she woke up. She lay in her own bed in her own apartment and looked at the ceiling and counted backward from thirty and arrived at today and lay there with that knowledge sitting in her chest like something with weight.

She had not heard from Cade since Thursday.

Not the car. Not the afternoon call. Not food arriving at her door. Just silence that had stretched from Friday into Saturday into Sunday morning and she lay in bed and told herself the silence was fine. The contract was up today. The silence made sense. This was...