She nodded. “That’s the weirdest part. Everything happens on Friday nights or long weekends. Sign-offs come through at 11:56 p.m. on federal holidays. The signatures look clean, but the rhythm’s off—like someone’s hoping they slip through the cracks.”
Something flickered in his expression—understanding, and something else she couldn’t name. “You have screenshots?”
“Some,” she admitted. “I’ve got handwritten notes and a folder named Marketing Review with screenshots of the original analysis living in the cloud.”
A pause. The man behind them laughed too loudly at his laptop. A spoon clattered against tile. The noise grounded her, barely. She took another sip of coffee.
“You told me not to carry anything home,” she said finally.
His gaze softened, the worry leaking through the armor. “Do you think you’re being watched?”
“I got a system alert on my laptop I’ve never seen before,” she admitted. “Then the numbers cleaned themselves up like it was a glitch in the Matrix. I could almost convince myself that I imagined the whole thing. But I have the screenshots.”
He nodded slowly, the muscle in his jaw tightening. “You’re not imagining it,” he said.
She hated that relief flickered through her. “I know.” Marshall was confident and steady, even in the face of something that had her unsettled.
Their server passed again. They both went silent, synchronized. The server kept walking. Norah’s shoulders dropped one notch she hadn’t realized they’d climbed.
“Why did you call me?” he asked finally, voice low.
She’d been asking herself the same question since the first text message. Despite their messy past, Marshall had a certain...safety in her mind. She didn’t know who he was working for, but it seemed like he knew far more about what was going on than she did.
“Because you’ve never lied to me,” she said. “And because the person I would normally take this to told me to give it air.” She stared into the coffee. “And because I don’t know what I don’t know.”
“The person you’d normally take it to,” he repeated, with just a hint of the question.
“Richard told me to trust my gut and give the facts time to catch up. He’s not dismissing me. He just...wasn’t alarmed.”
“From what I can tell from the outside, Richard is very good at not being alarmed,” Marshall said. “It’s part of why people trust him.”
That was very true. Richard was like Marshall in that way. Unflappable.
The rain threaded harder against the glass, a thin percussion. A pair of consultants slid past, arguing about a deadline. Norah watched them until they disappeared and then forced herself back to him.
“I reached out because I need a second set of eyes,” she said. “I don’t want to be out on a limb all alone.”
“My team is the best,” he said with a tip of his head.
She nodded. “I need to know if what I’m seeing is a pattern or a phantom.”
He considered her for a long moment, gaze steady, almost gentle. “It’s a pattern.”
“Then I’m not done piecing it together.”
His mouth tightened. “I don’t want you to be the one who proves it.”
There it was. Control dressed as care. It hit exactly where it always had.
“You don’t get to decide what costs I carry,” she said softly.
“I know.” He didn’t look away. “But I am asking you not to pay them alone.”
The tone disarmed her more than the words. She covered the reaction by smoothing a nonexistent wrinkle out of her sleeve.
“What doestogetherlook like?” she asked, wary. “Because iftogethermeans I hand you a problem and you disappear it, that’s not a partnership.”
He didn’t flinch. “Together means you talk. I listen. My team does what they do. Together means you stop logging in fromyour office to run those tests because they’re probably capturing your keystrokes and building a picture of your curiosity. Together means you let me set a buffer between your name and whatever this rolls up to.”
