"This afternoon."
While I was in the car. While I was watching the landscape change and holding my grandfather's flash drive and telling myself I was good at not holding on. He'd been on the phone arranging my enrollment.
I didn't know how to categorize that. Whether it was consideration or control or simply the same thing functioning as both. I suspected, with Dominic Moreau, that a great many things were going to fall into that particular ambiguity.
"What time," I said.
"Nine. Henri will arrange transport." He picked up his water glass. "You're free to find your own way after the first week, if you prefer."
"I prefer."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile, something smaller, more restrained, the suggestion of one rather than the thing itself. "I assumed."
We sat for a moment in the last of the meal's quiet. Outside, the garden light cast its circle on the bench and the path and the edge of the older, darker section beyond. I thought about the book upstairs. The handwriting in the front cover. Survive. The weight of the word left by someone who had needed to say it and hadn't been able to say it to anyone's face.
I pushed back my chair.
"Thank you for dinner."
He inclined his head. I picked up my napkin, set it on the table, and then he spoke, quietly, without moving.
"The flash drive you brought."
I went still.
Not visibly, I made sure of that, the stillness that was just a half-second pause rather than a reaction, because a reaction was data and I wasn't ready to give him data about this. I turned back.
He was looking at me with the same even attention. No agenda visible in it, no sharpness, just the same quality of focus he'd had since he walked in. Like this was simply the next piece of information to address.
"Keep it somewhere safer than your bag lining," he said. "This house is secure. Most of what's in it isn't."
I parsed that. Secure meant monitored, known, managed. The distinction was not subtle once you saw it: this wasn't a safe place. It was a controlled one. The degree of control varied by contents — and I had just been categorized accordingly.
The room was exactly the same temperature it had been thirty seconds ago. The garden light was still on outside. Estelle was moving in the kitchen, a quiet rhythm of plates and water.
Everything was the same. Nothing was the same.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.
It was a bad lie and we both knew it. I said it anyway, because sometimes you needed to say the bad lie to establish that there was a line, even if the other person had already seen past it.
He looked at me for a moment.
"Goodnight, Avery," he said.
Nothing else. No press, no follow-up, no indication that my deflection had registered as anything other than what it was. He simply returned to his water glass and the window, as though the conversation had reached its natural end and anything that came next was available but not required.
I walked out of the dining room, up the stairs, and into my room. I closed the door behind me.
Stood in the dark for a moment before reaching for the light.
He knew about the flash drive.
Not that it existed, my father could have told him that, could have mentioned it in any of the communications that had clearly preceded last night, could have disclosed it deliberately or carelessly or as collateral in a negotiation I hadn't been present for. That part didn't frighten me.
My bag had been unpacked when I arrived. I'd registered it as a service at the time — the careful refolding, the deliberate replacement of everything in a slightly different order than I'd packed it. I'd told myself it was the housekeeper. I'd told myself a lot of things in the first twelve hours.
What frightened me, what I was only now, in the dark of my room in his house, beginning to let myself acknowledge, was the safer than your bag lining part.