“Go ice your knee.”
The call ended. The apartment went quiet.
Fallon stood at the window for another minute, watching the light flatten against the brownstones across the street. The woman with the stroller had made it inside. The street was empty.
She turned, pulled her hair back with both hands, and twisted it into a knot at the base of her neck. She rolled her left shoulder, a controlled rotation that eased the tightness that had been building all afternoon.
Isaac’s face came back one more time. The easy way he’d held her on the dance floor, like he had nowhere else to be. The way the evening had felt different with him in it.
She let it go. Deliberately, completely, the way she let go of everything that didn’t serve the work.
Malcolm Prescott. Three weeks until the Harbor Light dinner. Research, reconnaissance, access points, timing. A Boldini sketch bought with stolen pensions. A man in Ohio who wrote letters no one answered and died at fifty-eight with nothing to show for thirty years of work.
Fallon opened her laptop and started working.
