Page 11 of Travis
"Sera." His voice dropped half a register. The gentle version. The one I hated most. "Everyone in this office knows you lost your sister to this network. Nobody faults you for wanting to see it taken down. But your job evaluations are based on your assigned work, and I need that fraud analysis before end of day."
He patted the top of the partition twice. The way you'd pat a dog that did a good trick but brought you the wrong ball.
"And Sera? I'd pull back from that communication node if I were you. That kind of access without authorization is the sort of thing that ends up in someone's incident report."
He walked away. I watched him stop two cubicles down and laugh at something Reynolds said. Easy. The kind of interaction between people who existed in the same ecosystem.
I turned back to the Kindt screen and stared at the vehicle registration I'd been adjusting before he interrupted. Three towns. Sixteen days. A pattern that fit my model like a key in a lock.
But nobody would freaking listen to me.
I couldn't provide proof, I could only provide patterns. Evidently from me that wasn't ever going to be enough.
The fraud analysis took me an hour and forty minutes. I sent it to Pratt at 3:52, eight minutes ahead of deadline, and he didn't respond.
I shut down my workstation at five. Walked through the lobby with my bag over my shoulder, green badge bouncing against my sternum. The security guard was chatting with a blue-badge agent about the Seahawks. Neither of them looked up as I passed.
My apartment was a one-bedroom in a building that advertised modern living and delivered functional plumbing. I kept it clean the way I kept everything: by system. Keys on the hook by the door. Badge on the table. Shoes on the mat. Bag on the chair.
I set my bag on the chair and stopped.
The kitchen drawer was open. The one next to the stove where I kept takeout menus and a flashlight and a box ofmatches I’d never used. Not open all the way. An inch, maybe less. The kind of thing most people wouldn’t register.
I registered it.
I stood very still and let my eyes move through the apartment the way they moved through data—looking for the thing that didn’t match the pattern. The living room looked right. The couch, the coffee table with my laptop and a stack of printouts, the bookshelf organized by subject because organizing by author was chaos.
The chair at my desk was pulled out at a different angle. A few degrees off from where I’d left it that morning. Most people didn’t push their desk chairs in to a precise position before leaving for work.
I did.
I walked to the bedroom door. Opened it slowly, like the speed would change what was on the other side.
The closet was closed. It was always closed. But before I’d left for work that morning, I’d placed a piece of clear tape across the seam between the door and the frame, like I did every morning. Right at the height of the middle hinge, invisible unless you knew to look.
The tape was broken.
I sat down on the edge of my bed because my legs made the decision before my brain did. My chest tightened, that familiar constriction that had nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with the lungs I’d been cursed with since childhood. I reached into my bag on the nightstand and found my inhaler by feel, took two puffs, and waited for my airways to stop pretending they’d forgotten how to work.
It was a trick I’d learned from Travis Hale, at a barbecue at my parents’ house four years ago. The tape, not the breathing. The breathing I’d been managing my whole life.
He and Naomi had been dating for about a year. It was a Sunday, one of those family afternoons my parents orchestrated around Naomi’s schedule because her career at the agency made her time precious and everyone else’s flexible.
Travis had spent most of the day on the periphery, dry and quiet, nursing the same beer for two hours while my father talked about the Bolland family legacy of service and my mother found new ways to say how proud they were of Naomi’s career at the agency.
I’d been on the periphery too. The usual spot. Close enough to be present, far enough to be uncounted.
At some point, Travis had ended up beside me in the kitchen while I was pretending to be busy with dishes. He’d watched me rearrange the same three glasses for a minute, lining them up with their handles at the same angle, and said, “You always put things back exactly where they were?”
I’d been embarrassed. It was a small thing, a habit I didn’t think anyone noticed.
“Most people don’t,” he said. “That’s useful, actually. Means you’d know if someone moved something.” And then he’d told me about the tape trick. Low-tech countersurveillance. Old tradecraft, simple and reliable. If the tape breaks, someone opened the door while you were out.
I’d asked him why he was telling me. He’d shrugged and said everyone should know how to tell if someone had been in their space.
He’d looked right at me when he said it. Not through me. Not past me to find Naomi. At me.
I’d thought about that afternoon more than I should have. More than was appropriate, given that the man belonged to my sister. I’d filed it in the part of my brain where I kept things I wasn’t allowed to want, and I’d started using the tape trick, not for any reason in particular.
