Page 431 of A Matter of Time

And with that, he left.

He didn’t offer me a ride, which was a relief, and he didn’t look at me again. He just got back into his car and left me alone, standing on the sidewalk in the rain. There was no other way for it to have ended.

I remembered halfway home that I still had my cashmere trench coat at Dane’s office. I was way too cold, soaked through every layer I had on, to catch the L and not end up getting hypothermia. So I took the detour downtown to Harcourt, Brown, and Cogan. I still had my key card for the after-hours elevator and another for the front door. When I got off on the sixtieth floor, I went immediately to the glass door and knelt to unlock the bottom, surprised when it swung forward. Someone was dead. Dane would murder whoever had forgotten to lock the door. I was betting on his latest secretary, Kristin. She had seemed perky when I talked to her on the phone, and Dane had called her energetic. It wasn’t one of his better compliments.

I noticed as soon as I stepped inside that the alarm light was green, which meant it had been disarmed. Clearly someone was there.

Walking by the front desk where Piper usually sat, I saw a light on toward the end of the hall. It wasn’t in Dane’s office, so I realized someone was burning the midnight oil. Maybe it was Miles Brown. I slowly took off my lace-ups, not wanting to track water across the marble floors, and also, I could be silent that way. I could slip up behind Miles and scare the crap out of him. He had a high-pitched shriek when he was startled, and I knew this from the many other times I had taken years off his life by jumping out at him. It was a lot of fun. But when I started down the hall, I realized Sherman Cogan was in his office instead. When I poked my head in, he turned from where he stood beside the wall and looked at me. His smile was instant.

“Hello there, stranger,” he said warmly. “Come for your old job back?”

“No.” I shook my head, slipping into his office. “Just came for my coat.”

“I see. Looks like you could use one. What did you do, stand outside for an hour?”

“Only a half hour,” I teased, walking over beside him to look at the blueprints on his wall. “It’s pouring out there.”

“Don’t I know it.” He chuckled, looking back at the blueprints. “That’s why I suggested to Melissa that she meet me here for dinner. We’re going to the Chop House.”

I nodded.

He turned and looked at me. “Would you like to join us? Melissa was just saying to me a few weeks ago that she never gets to see her Jory anymore.”

I liked Melissa Cogan a lot. She was funny and smart and could talk to me about chili dogs and sports and four-star restaurants and the ballet all at the same time. “Not tonight. I feel like a drowned rat. But soon. I’ll give her a call.”

“Do that,” he urged me, patting my squishy shoulder before looking back at the blueprints.

“What is this?”

“Project Miles is working on. I didn’t feel like walking back and forth from my office to his, so I had the guys make me an oversized set and tack them up in here.”

“From what, a digital file?”

“No,” he scoffed. “Listen to this—those guys at Delmar Construction only had one hard copy, can you believe it? How do you have only one set of plans to turn over?” He rolled his eyes. “So I had Jill take pictures of the other set and put it up in here.”

Had Jill take pictures.

Take pictures.

I went cold.

“Hilarious, right?”

“I—yeah.” I barely got it out before I bolted down the hall to Miles Brown’s office, opened the door, and turned on the light. There on his wall was the exact duplicate of what was in Sherman’s office, except the one I was looking at was in pieces and the other was in long sheets. And I was an idiot, because it had been staring me right in the face the whole time.

“Jory?” Sherman called out to me. “Buddy? You all right?”

The answer was no. I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

The drive out to Glendale Heights gave me time to think and put things together and just breathe. When I was almost there, my phone rang, and I saw Sam’s name on the display.

“Hi,” I answered quickly, distractedly.

“Hi? This is all you have to say?”

“Sam, I really don’t⁠—”

“So where is it you live now?” He cut me off sharply.