Adrian didn't ask another question. He stood up, hooked his arms beneath hers, and lifted her gently from the bottom step. She leaned into him instinctively, her weight settling against his chest, her breath catching as a sharp spasm tightened across her lower spine.

“We’re going to the hospital,” Adrian said.

“No,” she said, her fingers digging into his forearm through the heavy cloth of his coat. “Not Kings County. Not with Cross and Julian circling. If I go into triage under that legacy policy, Evelyn Cross’s office will get an automated billing notification within two hours. They monitor every claim on that group number.”

“Claire, you’re in pain.”

“I need to sit down,” she gasped, her forehead pressing against his shoulder. “Take me upstairs. Just... help me get up the stairs.”

Adrian looked up the narrow, winding well of the staircase—six flights, seventy-two steps of steep, uneven wood. He looked down at her unlaced boots, the swollen curve of her ankles, the grey exhaustion in her face.

“You’re not climbing these stairs,” Adrian said firmly.

“I can't stay down here in the hall, Adrian!”

“My place,” he said. “It’s two blocks away. Ground floor. No stairs.”

Claire stiffened, pulling back just far enough to look into his eyes. “I haven't set foot in your life since November, Adrian. I’m not starting now.”

“It’s not a life, Claire,” he said, his voice cracking with a raw, unvarnished honesty that stopped her breath. “It’s a room behind a laundromat on Albemarle Road. There’s a bed, a hot plate, and a deadbolt on the door. It has a radiator that works, and it’s fifty feet from a curb where I can hail an independent car service if this cramp doesn't stop.”

She looked at him, searching his face for the pride, the arrogance, the defensive posturing that had defined the final two years of their marriage—the man who had hidden the company’s insolvency until the marshals arrived at the pier.

She found none of it. She found only a thirty-four-year-old man in a coat with a frayed collar, his hands shaking slightly as he held her upright, terrified of nothing in this world except the fragile life moving beneath her sweater.

Another contraction rippled through her back, sharper this time, forcing a small, choked gasp from her throat. Her knees buckled slightly.

Adrian caught her before she could drop, lifting her off her feet entirely, cradling her against his chest as if she weighed nothing at all. He kicked the outer door open with the heel of his boot, shielding her face from the biting wind with the lapel of his coat, and carried her out into the falling snow of Flatbush.

The walk down Cortelyou was silent save for the crunch of his boots through the untreated slush. Passersby—a Bengali grocer sweeping the sidewalk outside his market, a woman pulling a metal grocery cart wrapped in plastic—glanced at them with the mild, incurious sympathy of city people who had seen every kind of human trouble play out on the pavement.

Adrian turned the corner onto Albemarle Road. Halfway down the block, wedged between a Caribbean bakery smelling of allspice and a shuttered storefront with yellowed butcher paper in the windows, was a low brick building.

He didn't put her down to unlock the door. He balanced her against his hip, his key finding the worn brass tumbler by memory. He pushed the heavy metal door open, stepped inside, and kicked it shut behind them.

The room was warm, smelling of cedar oil and old paper. There was a single iron bedstead against the far wall, neatly made with a faded wool blanket, a small pine table with two mismatched chairs, and a metal rack holding three shirts and a single dark suit in a dry cleaner’s plastic sheath.

Adrian carried her directly to the bed and lowered her onto the mattress, sliding a worn pillow behind her shoulders.

Claire lay back, her eyes wide, taking in the stark, monastic emptiness of the room. On the small pine table sat a single photograph in a plain silver frame—the only personal object in the entire space.

It was a picture of her, taken four summers ago on the ferry to Block Island, her hair whipped across her laughing face by the Atlantic wind, before the first subpoena had ever been typed.

Claire looked away from the photograph, her throat tightening painfully. “You kept that.”

“It was the only thing I took from Montague Street,” Adrian said quietly, kneeling beside the bed to unlace her wet boots.