Nothing.
Nothing about me. Nothing about the case, beyond the same six articles that had been online since the verdict and that had not been updated. Nothing in the small-town papers I checked, the local crime blotters I had bookmarked, the obscure Italian-language news site out of Brooklyn that had once mentioned Enzo Valenti’s hospitality investments in a single throwaway paragraph and that I checked every day because in this life you went where the trail had been and you watched for movement.
Nothing.
I sat back. I drank my coffee, which had gone the kind of lukewarm that was not refreshing in either direction.
The nothing was relief, because if my name had surfaced anywhere it would have meant the contract had been formalized. But the nothing was also the worst kind of silence, because it meant that if they had decided to hunt me down—and I was becoming more and more certain that they had—that they had decided to do it the other way. The way that did not leave a trail. The way that just arrived.
I closed the search tabs. I opened a real estate listing I had been pretending to look at for two weeks, in case anyone over my shoulder happened to glance. Two-bed in Andersonville, hardwood floors, exposed brick. Two thousand four hundred a month. Yes, yes, very nice, it could be just perfect for me.
I had been there ninety minutes when I decided to leave.
I closed the laptop with the unhurried, slightly bored movements of a woman who was wrapping up a productive morning of remote work. I slid it into my bag. I drank the last cold inch of the coffee in one swallow because waste was a thing I no longer allowed myself. I reached for my coat.
And I looked up.
He was sitting two tables to my right, against the front window, three-quarters turned away. Brown coat. Dark hair, cut short, with the slight curl at the nape of the neck of a man who had been a week overdue for a trim. He was looking at his phone. He was holding it the way a person held a phone when they were reading something on it, except that his thumb was not moving. He was still.
Fuck.
I knew his face.
Ninety minutes ago he had been on the second floor of the Harold Washington Library, standing at the magazine rack, holding open an issue of Bloomberg Businessweek that he had also not been reading.
My stomach went cold. Not the dramatic cold of fear. The administrative cold of the body deciding to redirect resources. Blood out of the extremities, into the core, into the legs. My pulse did not speed up. It steadied. The training that had outlived the career, again. Useful.
I did not look at him a second time.
I picked up my coat. I put it on with the unhurried care of a woman who had nowhere to be. I lifted my bag onto myshoulder. I checked my phone— actually checked it, made my face do the small flicker of attention a check produced—and put it in my pocket. I smiled vaguely at the septum-ring barista as I passed.
I walked out the front door.
Don’t show him you’ve seen him, I thought. Don’t show him anything.
Iwalkednorth.
I did not look back.
When the trial had been ongoing, and I had been paranoid about everything, I had researched how to lose a tail. Found some guide someone on reddit had written, a bunch of rules. Six blocks, the rule said. Six blocks of straight unconcerned walking before you allowed yourself to verify. Six blocks gave him time to commit to the follow, and gave you time to find a reflective surface that would not be obvious.
I counted them. State. Lake. Randolph. Washington. Madison. Monroe.
The morning was thin and bright in the way mornings could be in the city in winter, the kind of light that flattened everything, made the buildings look two-dimensional, made the people on the street look as if they had been pasted on. I had been walking long enough that my coat had warmed against me. I had been walking long enough to no longer feel my feet inside my boots.
At Michigan and Ohio there was a hotel with mirrored gold panels along the lower facade—the kind of architectural decision that had probably looked good in a 1987 brochure and had been quietly hated ever since by everyone who worked nearby. Icrossed the street toward it. I paused at the corner like a woman waiting for the light. I let my eyes go where my face did not.
He was there. Half a block back. Same brown coat. Same too-casual stride. He had closed the distance by about ten yards since the café.
The light changed. I crossed.
I turned east. Toward the lake. The lake was a bad choice in one direction—it gave him a closed corridor—and a good choice in another, because the lake meant the Magnificent Mile, which meant tourists, foot traffic, hotel lobbies, lobbies with multiple exits, the urban camouflage of crowds.
I cut through the lobby of the InterContinental.
I did it the way the forums said. I walked in like a guest. I made eye contact with the concierge as I passed the desk, gave her the small distracted smile of a woman returning to her room from a meeting. I walked through the lobby at the same pace I had walked in from the street, neither faster nor slower. I took the corridor past the elevators. I went out the side door onto a quiet stretch of Erie that fed back toward the river.
I did not look behind me at the side door. Looking behind me at the side door would have told the concierge something, and the concierge would have remembered it.
