Chapter 3: The Safe Life (1)
Anna Vance had spent five years building a life so unremarkable that no one would think to look for her here, and most mornings she almost believed it herself.
The alarm chimed at 7:00 AM, a gentle piano melody that wouldn't startle Leo awake in the next room. Aria—no, Anna, always Anna now—silenced it and lay still for three breaths, listening to the sounds of a quiet Tuesday morning in Beacon. No sirens. No shouting. No gunfire echoing off brownstone walls.
Just the hum of the refrigerator downstairs and the distant rumble of a garbage truck making its rounds.
She'd chosen this life deliberately: the modest two-bedroom rental in a neighborhood full of young families, the sensible sedan instead of anything that might draw attention, the carefully constructed normalcy that felt like armor most days and a cage on others.
This morning, it felt like both.
Aria pushed back the covers and padded down the hall to Leo's room, easing open the door painted with glow-in-the-dark stars. Her son slept sprawled across his twin bed, one arm flung over his stuffed elephant, dark hair messy against the pillow. He had her hair, her nose, her olive skin.
But those eyes—those impossibly dark, intense eyes—those were all his father's.
She'd known it the moment the nurse placed him in her arms. Known that someday, someone would see him and recognize.
Not yet. Not today.
"Leo, baby." She smoothed his hair gently. "Time to wake up."
He mumbled something unintelligible, burrowing deeper into his blankets.
"Come on, sweet boy. Ms. Rodriguez made those cinnamon muffins you like for morning snack."
That got him. Leo's eyes blinked open—dark and alert even in sleep-fog—and he sat up. "The ones with the cream cheese?"
"Those exact ones." Aria kissed his forehead. "Fifteen minutes, okay? Brush teeth, get dressed, and I'll make pancakes."
"Chocolate chip?"
"Don't push your luck."
But she made them anyway, because what was the point of building a safe life if she couldn't spoil him a little? Leo ate at the kitchen table while she packed his lunch, chattering about the ant farm his class was building and whether ants had friends or just coworkers.
"I think they're more like coworkers," Aria said, slipping his sandwich into his Spider-Man lunchbox. "They all have jobs to do."
"That's sad." Leo frowned, syrup on his chin. "Everybody needs friends."
"You're right." She wiped his face with a napkin, chest tight. "Everybody does."
Bright Horizons Preschool occupied a converted Victorian house on Maple Street, all cheerful yellow paint and playground equipment that met every safety standard Aria had obsessively researched. She walked Leo to his classroom at 8:15 AM, watching him join the cluster of four-year-olds building block towers.
His teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, smiled from the reading corner. "Morning, Anna! We're doing butterfly life cycles today."
"He'll love that." Aria crouched to Leo's level. "Be good. I'll pick you up at three-thirty."
"Okay, Mama." He hugged her neck, that unselfconscious grip of childhood that made her want to bundle him up and run. "Love you."
"Love you more than the sky."
"Love you more than dinosaurs."
Their ritual complete, she forced herself to walk away, resisting the urge to look back. In the parking lot, she sat in her car for a full minute, breathing through the anxiety that spiked every single morning when she left him.
Five years. Five years of this routine, and she still expected someone to be waiting when she turned around.
The drive to VanceTech Securities took twelve minutes, long enough for NPR to deliver headlines about trade negotiations and weather patterns, nothing about organized crime or missing Grimaldi daughters. Downtown Beacon was waking up: coffee shops opening, joggers on the riverside path, a normalcy so profound it sometimes felt like mockery.
Her office occupied the second floor of a renovated textile mill, shared space with a graphic design firm and a CPA. Sarah Chen was already there, two coffee cups from the good place steaming on Aria's desk.
"You're an angel." Aria shrugged out of her jacket, accepting the cup.
"I'm really not." Sarah settled into the chair across from her, iPad balanced on her knee. "I scheduled the Monroe Manufacturing follow-up for two PM, and Jenkins Pharmaceuticals wants a quote on their new data infrastructure. Also, someone from the Beacon Business Council called about sponsoring that cybersecurity awareness seminar in May."
Aria pulled up her calendar, scanning the day's commitments. Three client meetings, two proposals to finish, one conference call with a potential vendor. A Tuesday so ordinary it made her teeth ache.
"The Monroe pitch went well?" Sarah asked.
"They signed yesterday. Full security audit, implementation package, eighteen-month contract."
"Hell yes!" Sarah raised her coffee in mock toast. "That's three major clients this quarter. We're killing it."
We. As if this business was built on partnership rather than necessity, as if Aria had chosen this path instead of stumbling into it while pregnant and desperate, teaching herself network security from library books because it was something she could do from anywhere, something that required brains instead of connections.