Page 28 of Light My Fire

My phone buzzes against my ribs.

I shouldn't look. The cards are on the table and the woman across from me reads faces the same as I do, and I look anyway, because it's her ringtone pattern, two short, and some animal in me has been listening for it since Tuesday under everything else, under the news, under the van.

Change of plan. Not your place. The Blue Plate on Halsey, 8 tonight. Booth in the back. Bring answers, not bacon.

I read it twice. The first time my chest does the tightening, because she's pulling the venue out from under me, off my marble, out of my building, onto neutral linoleum where I have no kitchen to cook lies in and no bed to end the questions with. That's not a date, that's an interview, and the cold competent stranger I keep on staff notes that Dani Serrano is escalating, and that a smart woman would start to fear her.

The second time I read it, I notice my own mouth has gone and curved without authorization, because underneath the procedure and the public table and the bring answers, she's still coming. Two days after she carried a man out of my fire. Knowing what she knows, counting what she counts, she picked a diner instead of a door slammed shut.

I type the reply at the table, which is unprofessional, and edit it twice, which is worse. The first draft offers to bring the bacon anyway, and I delete it because charm is dodging and she'll smell it. The second draft promises answers I can't deliver and I delete that too, because of all the lies I'm carrying, I find I won't put one in writing to her tonight. What I send is the only sentence that survives the audit.

I'll be there. Ask me anything. I reserve the right to be a coward about some of it.

The reply comes back in under a minute, and it's one word, and the word is good, and a woman at the most dangerous table of her eleven-year war sits in a hotel bar smiling at a phone.

Cho is watching me over the rim of her glass with a reporter's terrible patience.

“Good news?” she says.

“Complicated news.” I put the phone away, stand, and settle the coat over my shoulders. “Five days, Ms. Cho. Verify everything. Trust nothing. Especially me.”

Outside, the afternoon has gone to a fine cold drizzle, the city smelling of wet iron, and I walk three blocks I don't need to walk with my collar up and my heart conducting itself disgracefully. It's done. The cabinet and the corkboard are sitting in a reporter's bag on a hotel banquette, out of my hands for the first time since I built them, and I keep waiting for the lightness people promise you, and what arrives instead is the strange bereavement of a person who has just outsourced her reason for living, and behind the bereavement, small but climbing, a question I've never once had to answer. If the documents finish it, who am I on the sixth day? I let myself have the rest of the truth on the empty stretch past the shuttered bank, where there's nobody to watch my face do what it does.

I'll answer what I can answer tonight, and dodge what I can't, and she'll know I'm dodging, she always knows, and somewhere past the coffee and the questions and the rain on a diner window, what runs between us will do what it's done every single time we've shared a roof, because it doesn't care about venues. She can pick the booth. She can set the terms. By midnight she'll be breathless in my bed again with her fist in my hair, both of us calling it inevitable to keep from calling it anything braver, and the worst of me, or the best of me—I've genuinely lost track—is already counting the hours.

The story breaks in five days. A fire chief is walking my scenes with photographs on her personal phone. Three witnesses are breathing in a hospital because I called a van a delivery.

And dinner is at eight.

15

DANI

Iget to the Blue Plate twenty minutes early and take the back booth facing the door, and if she notices I've stolen her move, and she'll notice, then good. That's the message.

It's been a day and a half since I watched her vanish from a tape line at dawn, and I've spent it badly. I slept in pieces. I added two names to the envelope and crossed one off. I drafted the change-of-plan text a dozen times before I sent it, because every version had to thread the same needle, close enough to keep her, far enough to mean it, and when her answer came back, ask me anything, I reserve the right to be a coward about some of it, I sat in the station parking lot and read it until Quinn knocked on my window and asked if I was praying. The truth is I don't know what tonight is. It's not a date and it's not an interrogation and it's not an ending, and I've crawled enough buildings to know that what you can't classify is what you respect most, so I picked a place with bright lights and witnesses and coffee instead of scotch, and I got here early, and I took the seat facing the door.

The rain committed around six and hasn't let up since, a hard straight autumn pour that turns Halsey Street into a black river with neon floating in it, and the diner is an island in the middle, steamed windows, pie case glowing, four customers and a counterman who calls everybody boss. The booth seats are red vinyl gone soft with decades of shift workers, and the coffee comes before you ask. I picked this place because nobody from either of our worlds would ever stand in it, hers because it's linoleum, mine because it's not ours. It's neutral ground. I have my questions stacked in my head like tools on a tarp; my envelope is locked in the truck because bringing it felt like pulling a knife. I sit with my hands around a white mug watching the door, and at eight exactly, headlights swing through the lot.

She comes in with rain on her shoulders and her hair pinned up and no umbrella, because of course she walked from wherever she parked, and she stands a second in the doorway while the bell over it goes quiet, finding me, and the look on her face when she sees which booth I took is worth the whole evening. It's not annoyance. It's recognition, one fencer saluting another, and then she crosses the room peeling off her coat, and underneath she's wearing a dark green sweater, and I know exactly one green item she's ever seen me in, and my heart does a small, stupid roll.

“You took my seat,” she says, sliding in across from me.

“Seemed fair. You took my week.”

The counterman brings her coffee without being waved at, tops mine, says, “You ladies holler,” and is gone, and the rain lays into the window beside us in gusts, and under the table, in the narrow space the booth allows, her knee finds mine and rests there, one point of warm contact, exactly like the Saltbox, and neither of us moves away, and that's the truce signed before the war starts.

“You said ask anything,” I say.

“I said I reserved the right to be a coward.”

“Noted.” I turn my mug a quarter-turn, her own move, and her eyes flick down to it and up, and the ghost of the rough-draft smile comes and goes. “Why are you always there before the flames, Zara?”

She doesn't perform surprise. She picks up her spoon and stirs her coffee, which she drinks black, so the stirring is just her hands needing an occupation, and the spoon makes one small bell sound against the cup, and outside a bus goes by with its windows lit like an aquarium.

“You've been reading,” she says. “Tell me what you've read, and I'll tell you if you're wrong.”

So I lay it out, no envelope, all memory, my voice low under the diner's clatter. The warehouse and the Calloway sharing a registered agent. Voss's foundation hosting the gala, Voss's group lawyered by Hartwell Pace, the fire on Camden that ate the records and spared the servers. The Crestline financed through Bellamy's fund, the cladding supplier on its permits, and a product-liability docket against Voss's holding company that got sealed faster than my department closes a hydrant. I watch her while I run it, and she listens with her chin level and her eyes warming degree by degree, and it's the worst possible reaction, because it isn't fear, it's pride; the look of a woman hearing her work described by the one student who did the reading.