The second plate disappeared as efficiently as the first. Twelve years of eating when you could, as much as you could,because the next meal was never guaranteed. My body had been trained to fuel and my body was fueling.
When the plates were cleared, I leaned back and lifted my hand for the check.
The waitress came over, but her hands were empty.
"No check," she said. "Someone called ahead. You're taken care of."
I held her gaze for a beat. "Who called?"
She shrugged, pleasant but unhelpful. "Didn't get a name. Just told us to expect a Mr. Dane and put it on the house account."
I almost asked whose house. I didn't. I just nodded. "Thank you."
She moved on.
I sat with that. The coffee in my hand, the empty plates cleared away, the morning light pressing warm through the window. The city walking by outside—slow, unhurried, a parade of people who looked like they belonged here and knew it.
Someone was watching me. Had been since the airstrip, probably. Since the bar in Texas, definitely. The hotel, the room, the comp'd room service, the name that made the clerk look at me like a riddle she'd already solved—all of it pointed in one direction. Someone wanted me here, wanted me comfortable, wanted me to feel the hospitality before they asked for whatever they were going to ask for.
I didn't like being managed. Didn't like the feeling of invisible hands arranging the furniture of my day. In my world, when someone set a table for you, it was because they wanted you sitting still when the door opened.
I should leave. Should find the airstrip, find a commercial flight, be back in my empty D.C. apartment by sundown, staring at the same bare walls, waiting for Briggs to call.
But I wasn't going to do that.
Because whoever was paying the tab could afford to pay for one more coffee. And maybe a pastry—the woman at the next table had something with chocolate and flaky dough that looked like it had been made by someone who took the craft personally.
I flagged a waitress.
"Another coffee," I said. "And whatever that is." I nodded toward the neighboring table.
"Chocolate croissant," she said. "Good choice."
"I'm told I'm on the house."
She smiled. "You are."
I settled back in my chair. Let the coffee come. Let the croissant come. Let the city walk past the window in its slow, assured way—tourists with cameras, locals with purpose, a kid on a bicycle weaving between parked cars.
The sun was fully up now, the light warm and clean on the old buildings across the street, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't in a hurry to be anywhere.
A soldier could always use more coffee.
Whatever Charleston wanted from me, it could wait until the cup was empty.
5
LOUISA
Iwoke up on the floor.
I'd made it to the sofa at some point in the night, but somewhere between the second notebook and the third page of calculations I'd apparently slid off it, and now I was on the heart pine with a throw pillow under my head and the low morning light coming through the tall windows at an angle that said it was early, but not embarrassingly so.
My neck disagreed.
I sat up slowly, working out the crick with one hand while I looked around at what I'd built during the night. Notebook open on the floor.
Three reference binders stacked in a row, each flagged with different colored Post-its. A legal pad covered in handwriting that got looser as the evening progressed—tight and precise at the top, nearly illegible by the bottom where I'd been working on something I wasn't ready to give a name to yet.
