Page 6 of Power Play

The pause that follows runs longer than any he's given me tonight, and the length of it is its own kind of answer. When he speaks again, the careful tone is gone. What replaces it is clipped and controlled, the voice of a man who just realized this conversation crossed a line he set for himself before he answered the phone.

"Keep pulling on it," he says. An instruction, not a discussion.

"That's not a confirmation."

"Wasn't a denial either." The faint sound of something being set down on a hard surface. "I'm not going to hand it to you, Keating."

"Because you don't trust me with it?"

"Because you'd trust it less if I did. So verify."

"How long have you known about Arthur?" I ask, pressing harder.

"Longer than you'd want to hear right now."

"Evasive."

"Accurate. There's a difference."

"There's a difference between accurate and complete, too."

Another pause. This one is warmer, and I can hear the shape of something close to a smile in the way he exhales. "You're good at this," he says, and this doesn't mean the investigation.

"I've been told."

"By Arthur."

"By the work."

The call drifts from the routing structure to the Beaumont filing dates he confirmed in last night's texts. I catch another of his tells: a habit of redirecting toward the operational whenever the conversation drifts toward something personal. He does it twice before I start listening for the pivot point, and the third time he tries it I'm ready.

"You just did it again," I say.

"Did what?"

"Changed the subject. I asked how you are, and you gave me an update on Meridian's filing timeline."

A beat of silence. Then, low and reluctant: "I'm fine."

"Nobody who says 'I'm fine' in that tone of voice has ever been fine in the history of the English language."

What comes through the speaker is low and rough and short, a laugh he didn't intend to let out, and the rawness of it hits me somewhere below my ribs where I wasn't braced for it.

This man, who controls every syllable that leaves his mouth, just cracked. What leaked through is warm and scraped and intimate, and it has everything to do with the hour, the dark apartment, my body stretched across the bed with the phone pressed to my ear and a dangerous man's breathing filling the room.

"Get some sleep, Keating."

"You should too," I say, and the sentence comes out in a register I didn't authorize, low and stripped, the voice of a woman alone in a dark room who forgot for half a second that this call has a professional justification she spent twenty minutes constructing. The quiet that follows is both of us hearing what I just sounded like.

The phone buzzes against my ear with an incoming call. The name on the screen is Sophia Oleander.

"I have to go," I say, and my voice is back where it belongs, controlled, professional, the forgery restored.

The beat before he answers runs too long, and the length of it tells me this isn’t where he planned to let the conversation end either.

"Night, Keating." Two words, delivered low, and the rough edge of his laugh is still in them.

I switch calls. Sophia's voice comes through clipped and precise, the cadence of a woman who grew up in rooms where small talk was a waste of trading hours.