The moment Ava left the building, the house felt like it exhaled. Not in relief, but the kind of resigned sigh a place gives when it knows its structural integrity is about to be tested.
Zach stood there, perfectly still, listening to the echo of her heels fade into myth. Then, very slowly, he turned to Eduardo—who had materialized from somewhere like an overqualified phantom.
"Follow her," Zach ordered.
Eduardo raised one immaculate eyebrow. "Sir, didn't she threaten to poison your espresso machine if you did precisely that?"
"She did," Zach admitted, already typing furiously on a secondary tablet he pulled from behind a bust of Napoleon filled with backup devices.
"And you are…?"
"Disregarding her instructions in the name of marital cohesion."
Eduardo sighed the sigh of a man who'd once taken a bullet for Zach in Bratislava and never emotionally recovered from it. "Very well. But if she finds out, I am blaming the garden gnomes."
