Page 32 of The Dangerous Dance

"I'm twenty-one," she says. "Competence isn't a function of age."

I look at her. She continues looking at her phone. I pick up my pen.

"What's Connolly," she says, still not looking up.

"Declan's problem. My problem through Declan."

"A loyalist?"

"Yes."

She nods. Not pushing further, which I've noticed she does — she takes what she's offered and she doesn't press for the remainder, which is either trained restraint or genuine respect for the boundary. I'm not sure which and I'm not sure it matters.

"The meeting with the Italians," I say. "I postponed it."

Now she looks up. "By how long."

"Three days." I meet her eyes. "I told Marco there was a development I needed to assess before we sat down. He accepted it." I pause. "I'm going to need to tell them something. When we do meet."

"I know."

"What I tell them depends on what you tell me."

She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she looks back at her phone. "Give me tonight," she says. "I need to think through what I can say and what I can't say and where the line is."

"All right."

"You're going to disagree with where I put the line."

"Probably," I say. "Tell me anyway."

She almost does something with her mouth that isn't quite a smile. It's the closest she's come to one in two days and I note it with the same involuntary attention I've been noting everything about her and go back to the Bayonne records.

The third morning is when she tries to leave.

I hear her at half past six, which is earlier than she's been moving, which is the first signal. I'm already at the kitchen table — I don't sleep past five-thirty as a rule, one of the many ways this life has reorganized my biology — and I hear her in the bedroom and then I hear the sound of the window being evaluated.

I set down my coffee.

The bedroom window looks out on the car park. It's a twelve-foot drop to a surface that is partially concrete and partially the metal roof of the laundromat's exterior unit. It's survivable, particularly for someone with the physical capability I've observed, but it's not clean, and she's smart enough to know that I've already mapped the external exits from this location.

I hear her try the window. I hear it open — I left it unlatched because locking windows feels like a statement I wasn't ready to make — and then I hear her stop.

She comes out of the bedroom two minutes later, dressed and carrying her coat, and she stops when she sees me at the table.

"Good morning," I say.

She looks at me. Then at the window she came from. Then back at me. "You left it unlatched."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because I wanted to see what you'd do when you found it." I pick up my coffee. "And because locking windows is a thing I'm trying not to do anymore."

Something moves through her expression. She sets the coat on the back of the chair and sits down and the attempt to leave is concluded without either of us needing to name what it was.

For about four hours.