Thirty seconds.
It doesn't matter.
Devin:Dev. Where are you?
A full minute. The longest minute. Robin reads over my shoulder, not pretending otherwise.
A pin drop. A shared location. The map loads on my screen and for a second I don't understand. It's not the library, not the café, not Haven House. It's Fifth Street. The 24-hour laundromat.
"He's at the laundromat," I say.
Robin makes a sound. Not a word. Just a sound. The kind of sound a person makes when the thing they feared is confirmed and it's worse than they imagined.
"Go," Knox says.
I go.
* * *
The laundromat on Fifth is a narrow storefront between a check-cashing place and a nail salon that's been closed for months. Fluorescent lights, the hum of machines, the warmth of industrial dryers and stale detergent. A hand-painted sign in the window: WASH & DRY 24 HOURS.
Through the glass I can see him before I open the door.
He's in the plastic chair by the window. The one facing the street, with a cracked armrest. His backpack is on the floor between his feet. His book is open on his lap,The House in the Cerulean Sea, but he's not reading. He's looking at the door, waiting for me, because he sent the pin and he knows what comes next.
He looks small. That's the thing that hits me first. In the café he's competent, precise, larger than his frame. In the library he's sharp, engaged, a mind that fills whatever room it's in. Here, in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights with his one backpack and his bruised face, he looks like what he is. A twenty-one-year-old kid with nowhere to go.
I open the door. The bell chimes. An elderly woman at the folding table doesn't look up.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." His voice is thin. Careful. "You didn't have to come."
"Yeah, I did."
I pull up the other plastic chair and sit across from him. The dryer behind us tumbles someone's sheets. The fluorescent light makes everything look slightly green, slightly wrong.
"How often?" I ask.
"What?"
"How often have you been here? Not just Thursday night. How often?"
He looks at his hands. "Thursday was the only overnight. After that I had your room. But I've been coming here in the evenings. After the library closes. Before I come to the bar."
"Every evening?"
"Not — Friday and Saturday I came straight to your place. But Sunday and tonight. After the library closed at seven, I came here for a while. To... I don't know. Decompress. Figure out the next step."
"In a laundromat."
"It's warm. It's open. Nobody asks you questions."
"Dev."
"I know." He closes his book. Sets it on the backpack. "I know what this looks like."
"What does it look like?"