Page 2 of Power Play
I don't call her. Not because I've decided to protect her from worry. Because I have nothing yet worth the cost of explaining how I'd know to worry in the first place, and that explanation runs straight through Priest, straight through this unit, straight through five years I'm not ready to hand her on the strength of a guess.
I lock the unit. I check the lock twice, which is once more than I usually do.
The drive to Bridgeport doesn't take long at this hour, streets empty enough that the truck's headlights are the only light moving on some blocks. I let the city go by without really seeing it, which isn't like me at all.
My mind stays on what Priest just told me, running it against every version of Meagan I've built in one morning of watching her, and none of the versions add up to careless. That's the problem with a woman that good. Careless would almost be a relief.
My loft takes up the top floor of a converted button factory, wide-plank white oak floors and a stone kitchen island long enough to seat six people I never invite, floor to ceiling windows on the south wall that I paid to have custom-cut because the standard sizes didn't let in enough light. Every piece of it was chosen because nobody else chose it for me first, a fact worth something to a kid who grew up eating dinner off a card table because the real one got repossessed with everything else. I built this with my own hands, and I keep it exactly as clean as the life I tell myself I'm still building.
It's quiet when I let myself in, and the quiet doesn't bother me most nights. Tonight it does. The reason has nothing to do with silence. It has everything to do with the specific size of the space where a woman's voice would sit if she were here, still working the Beaumont thread out loud, thinking better with her mouth moving than most people do in silence.
I noticed that about her before I noticed almost anything else. She narrates her own thinking, half under her breath, like the ideas need to hit the air before she trusts them.
I pour two fingers of whiskey I don't usually touch on a Tuesday and stand at the window instead of sitting, because sitting feels like giving up on the night doing anything else useful. The city spreads out flat and lit beneath me. Somewhere in it a door just got harder to open for reasons I won't understand until Priest calls back. I couldn't say yet whether that costs me, costs her, or costs nothing at all.
My phone lights up on the counter.
The Beaumont filing you mentioned. The one with the Geneva reference. Can you confirm the date range? Want to make sure I'm not misreading the sequence.
I read it twice. It's a case question, clean, professional, the kind of message any two people working the same problem might send each other on a Tuesday night.
I text back.
Late March through June. You're not misreading it. You're reading it better than the last three people who had that file, and one of them had a law degree.
Careful,
she writes back.
Compliments make me suspicious. Suspicion is my whole personality lately.
Noted,
I type.
I'll switch to insulting your work instead. Less confusing for both of us.
Do it and find out what happens.
Careful,
I type.
I've been told my insults have a body count.
You're not bad at Tuesdays,
she writes back.
You're bad at goodbyes. There's a difference.
That one sits heavier than the ones before it. I read it three times before I let myself answer, because there's a version of a reply that would tell her exactly how right she is, and I'm not ready to find out what happens if I send it. Five years of watching men in Arthur's orbit disappear from rooms without a word, and I never once thought of it as a skill worth naming until a woman I've known for four days named it without even trying.
I almost tell her right there. Stay out of that corner of the archive for a while. Not tonight, not until I know what this actually cost, if it cost anything at all. The words sit ready behind my teeth.
I should probably let you go,
she writes, before I've sent anything at all.
