By the time I reached the contract law building, I had almost forgotten, for approximately eight consecutive minutes, that I was living in the house of the grandson of the man who had paid someone to make Thomas Reyes disappear.
Almost.
Arceneaux was covering misrepresentation. I sat in the same seat and watched him pace his usual path between the rows, and I thought about the kind that didn't look like lying—when you told someone only the true things and left out the ones that would change what the true things meant. Whether that counted as deception or just very careful compliance.
I did not raise my hand.
* * *
Cleo was already at the bench when I came out at noon, which had become, over the course of one week, a pattern, the kind of pattern that established itself without discussion, simply through repetition and the mutual recognition that the thing was working.
She was eating something that smelled of rosemary and had a textbook open beside her that she was visibly not reading.
"Urban theory," she said, when I sat down. "It's supposed to be interesting. I've read this paragraph four times."
"Which paragraph."
She turned the book toward me. I read it. "The problem is the sentence structure. He's buried the argument under the methodology."
"There's an argument?"
"He's saying that cities don't fail, they relocate failure. Push it to the margins until the margins become their own city." I handed the book back. "New Orleans is probably one of his examples."
Cleo looked at the paragraph again with new attention. "That's actually interesting."
"The book doesn't deserve credit for it."
She laughed—the real kind, not the polished version. I'd learned to tell the difference in the past week without meaning to. The real one started in her eyes before the sound came out. It was the better one.
She told me about her morning, a recording session for a class project that had gone sideways because the university's equipment room had double-booked the good microphones, a conversation with a professor about a composition she was working on, a conflict between two students in her cohort that she described with the narrative economy of someone who found people interesting without finding drama interesting.
I ate my lunch and listened and offered observations when they seemed useful.
This was what the bench had become: a functional interval in the middle of the day, forty-five minutes of something that required nothing from me except presence. I had not told Cleo anything about my actual situation. She had not asked, had, in fact, demonstrated a specific quality of tact that consisted not of avoiding the subject but of never making me feel the weight of the avoidance. She talked to me like a person, which, in the context of the past week, was more valuable than she knew.
I was considering telling her something true, not everything, but something, the way you tested the ground before committing your weight to it, when I saw him.
He appeared at the far end of the central walk, coming from the direction of the administration building. He was in a dark coat over his usual suit, walking with the focused directness of a man who had come here for a purpose and had accomplished it. His attention was forward, on the path ahead, and then it wasn't.
He stopped.
It was a full stop, not a slowing, the kind that happened when something registered unexpectedly and the body responded before the decision to respond had been made. He was perhaps thirty meters away, at the edge of the formal garden that separated the central walk from the cluster of benches near the economics building, and he had stopped because he'd seen me.
I knew this because I saw his eyes find me. The direct quality of it, not a scan of the area, not a general orientation toward a familiar face, but the direct location of a person he'd been, on some level, tracking without realizing it.
Then he saw Cleo.
Something crossed his face.
It was brief, a second, less, and I had been watching him carefully enough over the past week to catch the things that moved through him in the gap before control reasserted itself. This was one of those things. Something that opened and closed too fast for me to name it with confidence, in the same way that a word sometimes sat at the edge of retrieval, present but not yet accessible.
It wasn't alarm. It wasn't suspicion. It wasn't the calculating assessment I'd seen him direct at people who represented problems to be managed.
It was something softer than any of those. Something I didn't have a ready category for.
Then it was gone.
He looked away, not pointedly, not with the performance of a man deciding not to look, but with the natural continuation of movement, his gaze returning forward, his pace resuming. He walked past the end of the garden path without slowing, without turning back, and disappeared around the corner of Moreau Hall in the direction of the staff parking area.