Watching to see if she's made me soft.
I hold his gaze for a long moment.
"That's your call," I say. My voice gives him nothing. "You have history with her. Whether you reach out is between you and her." I pick up my bag and stand. "It has nothing to do with me."
Beckett looks at me for one long moment.
Then the corner of his mouth moves. Just barely. The almost-smile of someone who got exactly the answer they expected and respects it anyway.
"Right," he says.
He picks up his bag.
We walk out together into the corridor, and the rest of the team folds around us, and the conversation closes the way it needs to — not finished, not resolved, just set down carefully for now.
The book is in my carry-on on the bus back to the hotel.
I don't take it out this time.
I have the handwriting memorized.
And somewhere across two states, in a city I'm not in, Cody Ravenshaw is awake and well and already thinking about everything he's going to do next.
I stare out the bus window at the Denver skyline bleeding amber into the dark.
He should enjoy the head start.
It's the last one he's going to get.
Chapter 35: Adela
Thelibraryisemptyat this hour.
Not fully — there are people, there are always people, scattered at tables with their headphones and their highlighted notes and their carefully organized crises. But the third-floor political science section at seven in the morning has exactly the quality of quiet I need right now. The kind that doesn't ask anything of you. The kind that holds you in it and waits.
I set my bag down at my carrel.
The chair across from me is empty.
I look at it for exactly one second, and then I open my laptop and tell myself I'm here to write the response paper that's been sitting half-finished in my documents. That's why I'm here. The paper. The deadline. The completely ordinary academicobligation that has nothing to do with the fact that this is the first time I've been back since I accidentally left my book on the table and walked out of here so fast I forgot to think about what I was leaving behind.
I open the document.
Read the last sentence I wrote.
Read it again.
I reach into my bag for The Prince, and my hand finds nothing.
I sit very still.
I unzip the front pocket. The side pocket. I pull the bag fully open and look inside, and the book is not there. I know it's not there because I left it on this table when Cody called and wanted to FaceTime, so I rushed home. And I left the book because there were larger things to not think about, and the book was the smallest of them. Sort of.
I look at the table. The surface is clean. No book, no sticky notes, nothing left behind. The carrel looks exactly as it did the first time I sat here three weeks ago, before any of this — before the annotations, before the arguments in the margins, before I started coming here for reasons other than studying.
I flag down the student working the reference desk. Young, tired, the particular expression of someone who has been here since the building opened.
"Did someone turn in a book?" I ask. "It would have been left on this table a few days ago. The Prince, Machiavelli, annotated edition."
