Page 9 of Power Play

She's been carrying weight since the last time we talked. I can hear it in the half-beat pause before she says my name, the way you can hear a crack in a foundation before you can see it.

"I need to see you," I say. "In person. Tomorrow. Somewhere I choose."

"That's not a request."

"No."

A pause that runs longer than it should. I hear her breathing change, the slight hitch that tells me she's deciding whether to push back and already knowing she won't. "Where?"

I give her an address. A bar in Logan Square that I've used before for conversations that can't happen over the phone or where we’d be seen by unwelcome eyes. Dark enough for privacy, loud enough for cover, far enough from the Loop that running into anyone from Arthur's world is close to impossible.

"What's this about?"

"Not something I'm putting on a phone line."

"You called me to tell me you can't tell me."

"I called you because it has to be in person and I'm not willing to wait."

The silence that follows is the specific silence of a woman who is too smart to miss what I just said and too careful to acknowledge it. I let the words stand because taking them back would make them louder.

"You understand that I'm not someone you summon, Kincaid."

"I understand that you're someone who's going to show up anyway."

The pause after that is different. Warmer. The faintest edge of something that could be a smile if she let it, and the fact that she doesn't let it tells me she knows exactly how much ground she'd be giving up if she did.

"Tomorrow," she says. "What time?"

My hand closes around the edge of the counter, and the grip is involuntary, the release of pressure I've been carrying since the diner. I let go before the next sentence.

"After the office clears. I'll text you."

"Kincaid." My name again, and this time the professional register is thinner, the composure less practiced. "Is this about the routing structure?"

"It's about what the routing structure is for."

The quiet that follows runs exactly long enough for me to understand that she's already been thinking about this, already running the second calculation underneath the first, already arriving at the version of the answer she doesn't want to be right about.

"Tomorrow," she says. The word is steady. The voice carrying it isn’t.

She hangs up first. The silence that replaces her voice is louder than any silence has a right to be.

I stand in the kitchen of an empty loft holding a phone that's still warm against my ear. On the island behind me sits a folder full of evidence that a woman I can't stay away from has been building a weapon she doesn't know exists.

The November wind presses against the south windows. The glass creaks. The city below keeps moving the way cities do when they don't know anyone standing above them just made a decision he can't take back.

I could tell myself this is strategic. I've told myself worse.

The truth is simpler, and the simplicity is what I can't redirect away from no matter how many times I try. I need to be in the same room with her. The reason has nothing to do with security protocols. It has everything to do with the distance between her voice on a phone and her body in a chair across a table. That gap is one I’m no longer willing to maintain. The unwillingness isn’t strategic. I know it. I'm going to do it anyway.

I set the phone on the counter, screen down. The loft holds its quiet around me. The folder sits on the island where I put it. The intelligence inside it will still be true tomorrow. The woman it's about will still be building the weapon. The man standing in this kitchen will still be the only person alive who knows both of those things at once.

I pour a glass of water instead of whiskey. A man who drinks alone two nights in a row is a man who's starting to need it, and I've spent my whole life making sure I never need anything I can't walk away from.

That was true before Keating. Before the corridor. Tomorrow I tell her the truth. Whether she walks away afterward is the one calculation I can't make.

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