Then the headlights behind them grew too close.
Now, on the storage-room floor, Claire heard David arguing beyond the door. Another man's voice said the mechanic had called police and that the little girl was inside a garage near the mill. The words reached her as though through deep water.
"Mia?" she called, but her voice was dry and thin.
A chair scraped outside. David approached the narrow interior window and looked through at her. His expression carried a strange combination of irritation and injured innocence, as if she had inconvenienced him by failing to accept his account of events.
"She's safe," he said. "For now."
"What have you done to her?"
"Nothing that can't be corrected. You're the one who made this necessary."
Claire had heard him use that sentence in business arguments. It always meant he had done something indefensible and wanted another person to carry the responsibility. She sat up slowly despite the headache.
"You took a child out of her mother's car and left her in a storm. There is no correction that makes that a misunderstanding."
"I was trying to keep her away from the argument."
"You created the argument."
David's face tightened. "Sign the proxy and everything stops being complicated."
She almost laughed, not because anything was funny, but because the absurdity left her nowhere to place her fear. "You cannot make a trust agreement valid by threatening the beneficiary's mother."
"You can make it possible for me to save what's left of Peter's work."
"Peter's work doesn't belong to you. Mia's inheritance doesn't belong to you."
He walked away. Claire listened to footsteps, a phone vibrating against wood, and the same familiar sound of her daughter's emergency ringtone. She understood with sudden clarity that David had her phone.
Beyond the window he answered an incoming call without speaking. A man's voice said he had found Mia safe and was trying to reach her mother. Claire forced herself toward the door and struck it with her free hand, but David ended the call before she reached the window.
"If you say anything to him—" she began.
David turned his back and typed on the phone. She caught only fragments of the screen before the light vanished: the word police, an address, and the unmistakable shape of a message she had not written.
"You need to stop calling them," he said, more to himself than to her. "Once the child is back, we can get everyone to calm down."
The other man, a business associate named Nolan Pierce, disagreed. Claire heard him say he did not want to go near police or a roadside garage. David answered that he needed to retrieve Mia before the situation became a kidnapping investigation. Claire pressed her forehead against the locked door.
"It already is," she whispered.