Page 6 of My Broken Biker

When a pause goes a little longer than the others I look at my phone and it's twenty to eleven.

"I should probably get ready for bed now," I say.

"Right," he says.

"I'm saying that because it's late."

"I know what you're saying."

A beat, and then: "Coffee tomorrow? If you want."

"I do," I say, and I let it be that simple.

We agree on ten, the same place, and say goodnight, and when the call ends I stay with the phone in my hand for a moment before setting it down, the screen going dark.

I get up and turn off the light, and then I go to Angela's room.

She's asleep, arms thrown wide and a book face-down on the floor where it slid off the bed.

I pull the blanket up around her and stand there for a moment the way I do most nights, just standing in the particular quiet of a sleeping child, the whole small solid life of her.

This is mine. I built it, and it's good, and I know what it cost.

I go to bed.

Chapter 3 — Jace

By nine-fifteen the work is done and sent and I'm standing in my kitchen with the second cup of coffee and nothing requiring my attention between here and ten o'clock except the ten minutes it takes to drive there, and I notice I've been ready to leave for twenty minutes.

The files for Cain took about three and a half hours, cross-referencing work that needs early morning attention, when the mind is clear enough to track the patterns that only become visible if you're looking at the right level of detail.

I'm good at this work.

I've made peace with the fact that I'm good at it and that it matters and that I do it from a kitchen table, which is a different kind of peace than making peace with the work itself, but it's where I've gotten to.

I don't examine the twenty minutes.

She's already at the table near the window when I come through the door, sitting with her hair down today rather than up, the auburn of it loose over her shoulders, catching the morning light differently than it caught the afternoon sun yesterday.

She has a coffee in front of her and a second one across from it, and when I come in she looks up with the same unguarded expression she's had every time I've seen her, nothing arranged for presentation.

"I guessed black," she says.

I sit down. "You guessed right."

The second coffee is black, still hot enough to steam slightly.

"How's the leg this morning?" she asks.

"Better than yesterday," I say, which is true, and she nods and moves on without dwelling on it, which is how I prefer that too.

The coffee shop does what coffee shops do at this hour, the breakfast crowd thinning out and the slower midmorning quiet beginning to settle in through the windows.

"What does the intelligence work actually look like?" she asks, after a while. "You said finding things, tracking things. I'm trying to picture what that means on a Thursday."

"Movement," I say. "Where people are, where money is, how information travels between people who don't want to be found traveling it. You gather incomplete pieces and build whatever picture they make, and then you fill in what's missing by understanding how the pattern has behaved before."

"Of what specifically?" she says.