Unknown:Are you back from Denver?
I look at those five words for a long moment.
She reached out.
She found a way to reach out, but why is she using a different number?
I type back immediately. Then I stop. Delete it. Write it again, slower.
Me:Yeah. Just got back. You okay?
I watch the three dots appear.
Disappear.
Appear again.
Unknown:I need to ask you something. Not over the phone.
Me:Tell me where.
She picks the coffee shop two blocks from Elm Hall.
It’s a small place, but it takes its beans seriously and its aesthetic even more seriously. I get there first and take a table near the back, where I can see the door, and order two coffees because I know how she takes hers, and that knowledge sits in me now like a hundred other small things I was never supposed to accumulate.
She comes in at eight forty-five.
Black coat, hair down, the composure she wears like armor. But I have to give it to her, she’s good at it.
She spots me immediately and crosses the room without hesitating, sits down across from me, and wraps both hands around the coffee cup I pushed toward her before she could ask.
She looks tired.
Not the exhaustion of someone who hasn't slept. The quiet tiredness of someone who has been thinking too hard for too long, and the thinking hasn't resolved into anything clean yet.
"Thank you for coming," she says.
"You asked."
She nods, looks at her coffee, and then up at me. "How was Denver?"
"We lost."
Something moves across her face. "I'm sorry."
I lean back in my chair. "What is it?"
She wraps her hands tighter around the cup. Outside the window, the morning moves past — people, umbrellas, the gray Seattle business of a Tuesday in November. She watches it for a moment like she's organizing something.
Then she looks at me directly.
"The night they broke into my room," she says. "The masked men."
Every muscle in my body goes very still.
"I've been thinking about it." Her voice is steady. "There were two of them. They were organized. They knew the layout of where I live. They knew I had the laptop." She pauses.
I say nothing, waiting.
