Page 55 of Hunt Me, Daddy

As if the name did not mean anything heavier than letters.

I took his hand because refusing would have been strange, and I refused to be strange when I could be observant instead. His grip was firm, warm, and far too controlled. He didn’t try to impress me by using crushing pressure. There wasn’t any lingering squeeze either. No little power play disguised as etiquette.

“Kit Calloway,” I said.

“I know.”

The words were simple. They made my spine prickle.

Then he added, “I read your critique of Chen’s model last year.”

Of course.

Perfectly reasonable.

Annoyingly, the correction did not make my spine stop prickling.

“My critique was a footnote,” I said.

“It was the most useful part of the paper.”

I blinked.

What he was saying was not flattery.

Flattery had a texture. It was oily, obvious, designed to make the flatterer look generous. Ivan said it like a technical assessment. Like he had weighed the paper, identified the load-bearing flaw, and found my tiny act of academic vandalism more relevant than the larger structure.

I did not know what to do with that, so naturally, I defaulted to suspicion.

“Most people did not notice the footnote.”

“Most people skim.”

“And you don’t?”

“No.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

That was when I realized he had no intention of filling silence just because it existed, which was almost refreshing in a way.

The hallway moved around us. People passed with paper cups and conference bags. Someone laughed too loudly near thesponsor table. The world was normal conference noise, but the space around Ivan felt quieter.

Contained, even.

He studied me for a moment, then asked, “When you are looking at a hostile financial network and the evidence suggests two possible stories, one provable and one true, which one do you follow?”

I should have answered carefully. There were safe answers. Professional answers. Answers designed for rooms full of lawyers and clients and men who wanted risk described in terms they could bill against. You followed the provable story. You documented the true one as hypothesis. You did not cross evidentiary thresholds simply because your instincts tugged harder than the logs.

I didn’t answer carefully.

Instead, I said, “I follow the one that keeps changing when I look away.”

His eyes narrowed, only slightly, but enough for me to notice and I realized I had answered before deciding to. That never happened. Or almost never.

My fingers tightened around my coffee cup and I saw Ivan notice.

“And if it changes because someone wants you to follow it?” he asked.