It had been three days since Nora disappeared. Three days without a message, a call, or a sign. Westbridge kept spinning alarms blaring, patients arriving, interns rushing through the corridors. But her absence carried more weight than her presence ever had. She had erased her steps so carefully, so completely, it almost felt like she had never existed in the first place.
Rowan had tried everything. Every floor, every stairwell, even the forgotten corridor she used to disappear into when no one was watching. He waited outside her apartment, searched her last log-ins, even contacted an old colleague of hers on a whim. Nothing. No note. No trail. Just silence. And that silence grew inside him like a second heartbeat. He didn't understand why she had left without a word or why she hadn't trusted him enough to say goodbye.
Meanwhile, Brenner walked the halls like he owned every corner of them. His posture was calm, composed, even gracious. But Rowan could see it the quiet satisfaction in his eyes, the smugness behind the smile he wore when shaking hands with board members. Nora had been erased. The narrative rewritten. And no one had the courage to question the version Brenner had sold them.
He found Elias in the staff lounge, sitting in the dim light, fingers curled around a cooling cup of coffee. Rowan didn't sit. He didn't even try to be calm.
"You knew," he said.
Elias didn't pretend to misunderstand. "I suspected," he replied. "But suspicion doesn't get you very far. And proof... proof gets you fired."
"You watched her fall."
Elias met his eyes. "And you didn't catch her."
There was nothing left to say.
That night, Rowan drove to the edge of the city. There was a motel just off the highway the one Nora had once mentioned casually during a late-night shift. A place she stayed when she first arrived in the city. Neutral. Quiet. The kind of place where no one asked questions. He parked outside, waited for over an hour, watching the windows glow and flicker. But she never came.
Somewhere else, in a cold, rented room with stained curtains and cracked walls, Nora sat at the edge of a bed too stiff to feel like comfort. In her hands, she held the photo of Lily. She didn't cry. She didn't move. She simply breathed. That was all she could manage. It wasn't grief. It wasn't rage. It was something deeper. Something old and numb like a wound that no longer bled but never stopped hurting.
She thought of Rowan. Of his voice. Of the way he'd looked at her in the boardroom, as if he still believed something could be salvaged. As if he didn't understand that timing mattered and his had come too late.
She opened the notebook Lily had once drawn in, the pages now filled with diagrams, names, facts. On a blank sheet, she wrote in steady block letters:
"Brenner isn't the disease. He's the symptom."
And in that moment, Nora Keane understood one thing with perfect clarity.
She wouldn't return to defend herself.
She'd return to finish what she started.