Page 40 of His Wall

"No, ma'am."

"Talk soon."

She hung up.

I set the phone down on the cushion beside me. My throat was tight. I picked the coffee mug off the floor and crossed to the kitchen. I dumped what was left of it into the sink and stood at the counter with my hand on the rim of the sink and let my breath go.

The lie was an omission. The omission was operationally sound. I had reported what was relevant to the case. I had not reported what was relevant to my body. The Bureau did not need to know that I had let my mark put his hand at the back of my neck and his mouth on mine. The Bureau needed to know that the closer approach was working and that I was making him talk. Both were true.

The other thing was also true.

I rinsed the mug. I put it upside down on the rack. I went to brush my teeth.

Twenty minutes later I had not yet decided whether to shower or go for a run when the floor safe at the foot of my bed buzzed.

I crossed the bedroom, knelt, spun the dial, and lifted the lid. The personal phone Claire Kent did not own was lit up on top of the equipment kit.

Torres

I'm still in town. Dinner tomorrow night? No pressure. I just want to see you.

My stomach dropped.

I sat back on my heels with the phone in my hand and my left hand still on the open lid of the safe. The morning light came in slant through the blinds and fell in slats across the floor.

I read it twice.

I thought about not responding.

I thought about the fact that the only way to get rid of Torres was to look him in the face and tell him. I had been refusing to do that for fourteen months, and that was its own kind of leaving him on a hook.

I typed.

Leah

Fine. One dinner.

I hit send before I could change my mind.

I put the phone back in the safe. I closed the lid. I spun the dial. I sat on the floor with my back against the foot of the bed and my hands flat on my knees and did not move for a long minute.

The floor was cool through the sweats. The plant on the windowsill had a single new leaf at the top of the stem I had not noticed yesterday. The slats of light moved a quarter-inch across the floor as the sun came up another degree.

I got up.

I went for my run.

The Vanguard lobby was busy at 8:15 a.m. Sarah had two iced coffees in a cardboard tray and a paperback in her free hand. She lifted the tray at me without breaking stride. The elevator was crowded. I rode it up with a man from compliance and a woman from the third-floor analyst pool and I did not look at my reflection in the brass.

I came off on forty-two and heard the music before I saw the door.

Quiet. A piano. Something with a low bass line under it I did not recognize. His door was half-open. He was at his desk in shirtsleeves with the sandy hair still damp from a shower and his coffee already at his elbow. His head was bent over a printout I had laid on the corner of his desk last Thursday.

He had been there longer than I had.

I crossed to my desk, set my bag down, shrugged my coat off, crossed to the kitchen and made his coffee — flat white, no sugar, a single shot extra — and carried it back across the carpet to his door.

I knocked once on the frame.