* * *
We sat in the office for a while longer. The conversation moved, not away from what had been said, but around it, building out from the center. He told me more about 2001, about the federal task force and why it had collapsed, about the specific ways in which Ramón Salas had been three steps ahead of an investigation that had never quite caught up. I listened with the part of my mind that held things in permanent storage and asked questions with the part that identified gaps.
It was the most direct conversation they had ever had. Not the most intimate, though it was that too, in the way that shared information always was, the way that knowing someone's architecture made them more present than any amount of proximity could. But the most direct. No sub-text, no managed disclosure, no careful management of what the other person was allowed to understand.
At some point, without deciding to, I had stopped thinking of him as a subject of analysis.
I noticed this the way I noticed most things, quietly, without reaction, marking it as something that would need to be examined later when I had the room for it.
Later.
"There's something else," I said, when a pause opened up that felt like a door. "About the acquisitions report, the fourth layer I've been mapping. The gap I told you about." I watched his expression. "It's deliberate. Someone is leaving a window open. Specifically in the structures that interface with Salas's current operations."
Dominic's attention sharpened. Not surprise, he didn't do surprise the way other people did, but a recalibration, visible only in the slight shift of his posture. "You're certain."
"I'm certain the gap is deliberate. I'm not certain who left it." I paused. "But I have a hypothesis."
"Tell me."
I told him.
By the time I finished, the light in the office had shifted, the morning amber gone, full daylight through the windows, the city fully awake below. An hour had passed, maybe more. I hadn't been tracking it.
When I stopped talking, he was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're good at this."
I blinked. It was possibly the most direct thing he had said to me that wasn't logistical or strategic.
"I know," she said.
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The shape of one.
"I know you know," he said. "I'm saying it anyway."
I looked at him for a moment. This man who had kissed me in a garden and made me coffee without asking and was now sitting across from me in the full light of morning telling me that my mother's death might not have been an accident with thesame steady attention he gave to everything, as if the weight of it required presence rather than distance.
I thought: I don't know what to do with you.
I thought: That might be the most honest thing I've felt in years.
I said neither of those things.
"I should get back to the report," I said instead.
"Yes." He stood. I stood. "Avery."
I stopped at the door.
"I'm sorry," he said. "About your mother."
The words were simple. He said them the way he said everything that mattered, without ornamentation, without the additional sentences people usually added to soften or cushion or fill the space. Just the thing itself, placed carefully, given the weight it deserved and no more.
I nodded.
And walked out.
* * *
Chapter 19: Salas Makes Contact