Chapter 2 - THE NEW IDENTITY
Six months later, the coastal town of Silver Creek, Maine, offered a suffocating kind of anonymity. It was a rugged, windswept fishing community where everyone minded their own business and tourists were rare outside of July.
Lena—now calling herself Nora Miller—rented a drafty, cedar-shingled cottage perched on the edge of a jagged cliff overlooking the gray Atlantic. Her dark hair was cut short and dyed a dull chestnut brown; her stylish clothes had been replaced by oversized flannel shirts and thrift-store denim designed to obscure the undeniable, heavy swell of her seven-month pregnancy.
She worked as a night-shift clerk at a local maritime logistics warehouse, logging data invoices under a forged social security number she had purchased through a desperate dark-web contact in her second month on the run. It was exhausting, punishing work, but it paid in cash envelopes and kept her isolated from the rest of the world.
Every night, she locked herself inside the cottage, double-checking the deadbolts, drawing heavy blackout curtains across every window. She lived in a permanent state of high alert. Every time a luxury car drove down the gravel highway, every time a stranger walked into the local grocery store asking questions, her heart leaped into her throat.
Yet, despite the constant terror, a fierce, protective love had grown inside her.
May you like
She would sit by her small wood-burning stove at night, rubbing her swollen belly, whispering promises into the dark. "I will protect you," she would tell the baby. "No matter who your father is, no matter what it takes, we will never be part of his world."
She had managed to outrun the ghost of Dominic Moretti for half a year. But she didn't know that men like Dominic Moretti never truly stopped hunting. And in a digital age, a phantom leaves footprints even when she thinks she has erased the path.
