He looked up.
I didn't know what I'd meant to say. Something that acknowledged this, maybe, this thirty-minute interval of being two people in a garden rather than two parties to an arrangement. Something that noted it without making it into something it wasn't.
"Thank you," I said. "For the forty-eight hours. Next time."
The corner of his mouth moved. "I'll manage it."
I went inside.
* * *
Back in my room, I sat at the desk with the lamp on and the window dark behind me, and I looked at the inner pocket of my bag. Empty now. I had moved the flash drive days ago.
I had moved the flash drive the night after the dinner conversation, taken it from the bag lining, found a better place. Then moved it again, two days later, to somewhere more deliberate: inside the spine of a book on my shelf, the one I'd brought from home, slid behind the rear endpaper where it sat flush and invisible unless you knew to look.
I took it out now.
It was so small. A thing you could close your hand around and forget you were holding. My grandfather had pressed it into my palm with the weight of something much larger, and I had carried it that way ever since, with that borrowed weight, that sense of significant cargo.
Only open it if you need real protection. The kind that matters.
I plugged it into my laptop.
The contents loaded slowly, the drive was old, the files numerous enough to suggest it had been filled deliberately, over time, with accumulated purpose. I looked at the folder structure first: dates, mostly, spanning fifteen years. Individual files within each folder, named with combinations of numbersand initials that meant nothing to me yet. The earliest date was 2009. Not 2000, not 2001, not the year Thomas Reyes had been prosecuted. Someone had built this archive years later, after the fact, reconstructing what the prosecution had abandoned.
I opened the earliest folder. 2009.
Three files. Two were image files, photographs, I found when I opened them, scanned from physical prints by the look of the quality. The first showed two men standing outside a building I didn't recognize, a brick facade, nighttime. The second showed a document, handwritten, too small to read at this resolution.
I enlarged it.
A name, at the top. A date. An address in New Orleans.
And below it, in the careful handwriting of a man making a record he wanted to survive him:
Payment received. J. Moreau.
I stared at it.
J. Moreau.
The folder contained fifteen years of files. Fifteen years of whatever my grandfather had been collecting, whatever he had needed to protect, whatever he had believed was important enough to press into the hands of his granddaughter with instructions to use it only when the protection was real and necessary.
And it began with the name Moreau.
I closed the folder.
I sat very still for a moment, looking at the screen.
Then I unplugged the flash drive and held it in both hands, and I noticed, with the detached clarity of someone observing themselves from a slight distance, that my hands were not steady.
They were trembling. A small, controlled tremor, the kind that happened when the body received information the mindhadn't yet fully processed. Not fear, exactly. The precursor to it. The moment before you understood what you were afraid of.
I put the flash drive back in the book.
Put the book back on the shelf.
Went to the window and looked out at the garden, where the light was fully up now and the magnolias were white and green and real, planted by a man who had done very little good, outlasting him by decades.