Kate pressed the heel of one hand to the bridge of her nose—one deep breath, two—and tried to assemble her thoughts into something more than a swarm.Confirmation burned at the center: he’s alive.Another thought circled it, meaner, harder to hold: he wants you toknow.And he wants you to knowwhathe knows.The thought had frightened her half an hour before.Now it just made her angry.
The phone in her pocket buzzed.
She glanced at the screen, already braced for it to be Marcus, checking up.Instead, a name: Gabe Levine.
Just the sight of it felt like a hand on the back of her neck—steadying, unmistakable.She took the call.
“I thought you might ignore me,” Gabe said, without greeting.His voice carried the same bemused gravel it always had, the voice of a man who had been up too late with ancient texts and coffee and still found something to smile about in the morning.“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Why would I do that?”Kate asked.
“Oh busy busy,” Gabe replied.Some of the things he said could be confusing, as if he was holding another conversation with someone else, or just himself, and the lines got crossed. But Kate still found a comfort in that: if Gabe was perplexing, he was at least consistently perplexing.And when it came to the things that really mattered, he always made sense.
“Enjoying New York?”he went on.
“How do you know where I am?”
“I’d like to say it was my super-powers,” he said.“But the tv news showed you and Marcus stepping out of an NYPD cruiser looking jet-lagged.Anyway, guess what, I’m in the city too.Ten days of lectures at Colombia and a hotel bed that sags in the middle.I’ve got an hour or two before I have to be respectable again.Shall we meet?”
The question landed on her like a lifeline.She looked at the street, reflected in the precinct glass: the bustle, the bikes, the voices.“Twenty minutes?”
“Fifteen if you jog,” he said.She could hear him smile.“I’m on 112th and Amsterdam.There’s a diner that looked dated when Jimmy Carter was in the White House.”
She ended the call on another laugh she hadn’t expected to find and texted Marcus:Taking ten.Meeting Levine round the corner.The dots pulsed immediately.
Tell the rabbi I said hi.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The diner was one of those anachronisms that shouldn’t have survived the century — a chrome-and-formica relic wedged between a falafel joint and a boarded-up dry-cleaner on Eighth Avenue, its neon sign sputtering the wordEATSlike a half-hearted command.It was the kind of place where time had congealed somewhere around 1973: cracked red booths, coffee cups the colour of bone, laminated menus curled at the edges, a jukebox that hadn’t worked since the first Bush administration.
Kate stood on the pavement for a moment, collar up against the wind, watching her own reflection ripple in the glass.She could see the people inside — the lunchtime crowd of the city’s overlooked and over-scheduled: delivery boys on break, junior traders with loosened ties, two middle-aged women sharing an omelette and a grievance.The air shimmered with heat and the smell of frying oil.It shouldn’t have been comforting.But somehow it was.
She pushed the door open.A little bell jingled overhead, announcing her to the room.
“Coffee, hon?”called the waitress from behind the counter — a blonde in her fifties with a heart-shaped face and a smoker’s laugh.
“I’m just looking for a friend, thanks,” Kate said, scanning the booths.
He was already there, of course.Gabe Levine had never once in his life been late for anything.He was seated by the window, resplendent in a pale blue three-piece suit and a polka-dot bowtie.A stack of papers and a leather-bound notebook in front of him, his red-rimmed spectacles glinting under the fluorescent light.
The years had etched themselves gently onto him — faint creases around the eyes, a little more grey in the beard — but he was otherwise unchanged: the same calm, deliberate presence she remembered from her grad-school days.
She slid into the opposite booth.
“Professor,” she said.
He smiled.“You haven’t called me that in years.”
Gabe’s career had been a mirror image of Kate’s: an FBI profiler turned academic, he’d been influential in convincing Kate to quit research for a career in law enforcement.
“Muscle memory.”
“I’ll take it as a compliment.”
He gestured to the waitress.“Two coffees, please.One black, one with extra milk.”
Kate opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.He remembered everything — even her preferred ratio of dairy to caffeine.That simple fact made her throat tighten unexpectedly.
