"You didn't drive forty minutes for the scenery," she said.
"No." There was no point dressing it up for her. "I came out here to be somebody I used to be. For a night."
"How'd that go?"
"He doesn't fit anymore."
She nodded like I'd confirmed something she'd worked out an hour ago. Then she stood and pulled her jacket on.
"One more thing, free of charge." She picked her phone up off the bar and looked at it rather than me, and her voice lost some of its polish. "Whatever you end up holding, put it in her hands yourself. Across a table, in your own voice. The thing that finished Russ and me wasn't selling the company." She pocketed the phone. "It was me finding out how much got decided in rooms I wasn't in."
She settled her collar and gave me a nod, this woman with her flattened beer label and her alumni and a town she'd landed in rather than lived in.
"Make it count," she said. "The group chat doesn't need new members."
She walked toward the door without looking back, and I sat there with my beer going warm in my hand and Pippa from Durango in my phone and the clarity that arrives when you've been trying to outrun something and you finally stop moving long enough for it to catch up.
I texted Pippa from Sofia's driveway, apologized for the hour, and asked when she had time to talk. The typing dots appeared before I'd finished locking the truck.
Anytime, the reply said. Durango's been waiting two years for this call.
TWENTY-THREE
DAEMON
I'd barely made it into the mobile office at the job site Friday morning, desperate for coffee, even instant, when Malakai joined me. His face was doing the thing it did when the news wouldn't be welcome.
I'd woken up knowing I wasn't the man I used to be. It should have been a good morning. Malakai had other ideas.
"Elevate filed formal complaints," he said, without so much as a good morning. "Health Department, Business Licensing Board. Two separate filings, both this week."
I stared at him. "Against Nadia."
"Against Coogan's Catering, yeah. Cole has a contact at the licensing board who flagged it yesterday. They're not frivolous complaints, either. Someone took their time with these."
The cold that settled in my gut wasn't new. I'd been feeling it since Sunday morning in a parking lot, watching her taillights disappear. This was a different version of the same thing.
"She knows?"
"Not yet." Malakai held my gaze. "Cole wanted to know if you were going to tell her or someone else."
Someone else. Because I'd lost the right to be the one she heard hard news from. Because I'd handed that back to her personally in my chintz-covered corner of Sofia's property, telling her this might have been a mistake.
I turned away, walked to the window, and looked out at the yard, seeing none of it. "Tell Cole to reach out through Kelly. She'll make sure Nadia has the information without having to hear it from me."
Malakai said nothing. I thought he was done, but then he mumbled, "There's more."
I turned back.
"I dug further into what Elevate's been doing since the complaints were filed. They're not only going after her licensing." He pulled out his phone and turned it toward me. "They're building a file on you."
I looked at the screen. Malakai's notes to himself, detailed and careful, with screenshots attached.
Elevate had hired someone to compile background research on the people connected to Coogan's Catering. My name was on the list. My record was in the file. Arrest, charges, conviction, sentence. Three years in county. All of it, laid out cleanly for whoever was going to use it.
"They're going to take it to her corporate clients," I said.
"That's my read. Conservative clients, the sort who'd run background checks if they thought to. Elevate plants the association, suggests they do their due diligence, and suddenly Nadia's losing contracts not because of anything she's done but because of who she knows."
