Silas, who has never once asked for something for himself.
I type back:Yeah. I do.
Three dots. A long pause. Then:
I think I'm ready to stop reading about it.
I set the phone down. Pull Nico closer.
Something is shifting in Silas. I can feel it the way you feel weather changing. Not visible yet, but present in the pressure. The quietest member of this pride, the one who watches everything and says almost nothing, is looking up from his book.
My lion sleeps. The building holds us. The bar endures.
Chapter 26
Nico
Six weeks later, I finish the book.
Not Silas's book — I finished that two weeks ago, on a sunny afternoon in the booth, and sat with the last page for a long time. The butler, reflecting on his life. The choices he made and the ones he didn't. The woman he could have loved if he'd let himself. I closed the cover and put it on the bar and Silas appeared — the way Silas does, like he was waiting for this exact moment — and set a new book in front of me without a word.Giovanni's Room.Baldwin. I haven't started it yet. I'm still sitting with Ishiguro.
The book I finish today is the NSRC's case file on Coldwell Development.
Diana Okafor sent it to me last week — the complete investigative report, two hundred and forty pages, every property documented, every transaction traced, every thread I pulled now woven into a legal document that will end Richard Langford's career and possibly put him in a federal facility. My spreadsheet is in there. My analysis. My name, cited fourteen times as the primary whistleblower.
I read it at the booth. My booth, with the outlet Ezra cleared and the charger plugged in and Mango on the windowsill doing her slow blink at the parking lot. The coffee is in the good mug. Jason made eggs this morning — he makes eggs every morning now, for whoever's downstairs, because Jason feeds people and has stopped pretending there's a limit to the guest list.
The last page is an appendix. Twenty-six properties listed in order of acquisition. Business name, owner, location, status. Most say DEMOLISHED or VACANT. Four say UNDER REVIEW — the ones the NSRC is trying to unwind.
I close the file. Set it facedown on the table, which is still my default, but only for documents. My phone sits face-up now. Has for weeks. Small distinction. Matters to me.
"Done?" Ezra asks, from his stool. Not looking up from the books. He always knows.
"Done."
"And?"
"It's thorough. Diana's team is good. Langford doesn't have a defense — the project codes alone are enough, and when you add the pattern analysis and the financial routing, it's—" I stop. Rewind. "It's done. It's handled. The right people have it."
"But?"
"Rosa Navarro's shop is still a vacant lot."
"You can't fix that one," he says.
"I know."
"You can fix the next one."
"I know that too."
He returns to the books. The conversation is over, and it was exactly enough.
* * *
I call Diana at ten.
"Nico." She says my name now, not Mr. Ward. Three weeks of phone calls and email chains and one very long video conference where I walked her team through Coldwell'sacquisition model will do that. "I got your analysis on the Portland portfolio. It's exactly what we needed."
