Nadia stood. Picked up her bag. She hadn't looked at me directly once since she'd walked in, and she didn't look at me now. "Malakai, I appreciate it. Let me know when he has something. Anything."
"Will do."
She was at the door. Stopped with her hand on the frame. "Thank you for pulling this together, Malakai."
"No problem," he said.
She left without looking back. I listened to her footsteps down the corridor, the sound of the main door, and then nothing.
Malakai leaned back in his chair and looked at me.
"Don't," I said.
"I won't say anything."
"Good."
I left before he could change his mind.
The first few hours after viewing the footage, I told myself it was fine.
I was fine. This was fine. Nadia and I had been something brief and intense, and now it was over, and that was how these things went. I'd known from the start she was too smart to take a chance on someone like me.
I'd known it and hadn’t backed down. Now we were here, and the only surprise was that it had taken this long.
I told myself all of that with complete conviction and went back to work. For about forty-eight hours, it almost held.
Then it stopped holding.
By the following day, I was useless on the job site. Tyler told me twice to focus. Ethan said nothing, which was worse. He watched me the way he watched everything, and I did my best to pretend I didn't notice.
I drove to Millbrook on Thursday night because nobody in Millbrook knew my name.
That was the real reason, although I dressed it in better ones for the length of the drive. Forty minutes inland, a main street with three bars. I picked the loudest, because the loudest was where the old version of me would have gone, and the old version of me was who I'd come here to find.
He'd been easy. He'd been bulletproof. Nobody had ever looked at him the way Nadia had looked at me in that parking lot.
The uniform still fit. That was the first discovery of the evening. I ordered a beer, took up the correct amount of space at the bar, said something to the bartender that made her laugh on her way past. The machinery still worked.
The woman two stools down was funny. That was the second discovery. Sharp without being cruel, the sort of funny that came from paying attention to the world rather than performing for it.
She had dark hair and an expressive face, and she laughed at her own jokes before she finished telling them, which should have been annoying and somehow wasn't. Under any previous set of circumstances, this would have been the easiest evening of my life.
"You're not from here either," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Coogan's Break. On the coast."
"What brings you to Millbrook on a Thursday?"
"Needed a change of scenery."
She looked at me in a way that said she'd heard that before and knew what it usually meant. "Bad week?"
"Something like that. You?"
"I live here." She reported it as if it were the weather. "Eleven months."
"You don't sound convinced."
