"Seventeen years later."
"If it was hidden properly. If no one else found it first." He stood, moved to the window, the same movement I had come to recognize as the way he organized thought while in motion. "Salas doesn't know we have the property. He's been looking for it through other channels, through your father, through Reyes's known associates. If he had found the building, he wouldn't still be applying pressure."
"Unless he found it and found it empty."
"Also possible." He turned. "But I don't think so. Victor doesn't apply pressure past the point of utility. If he had what he needed, the leverage would have been released."
I considered that. "We need to see the building."
"Yes."
"Without Salas knowing we're looking."
"Yes." He was already thinking forward, I could see it. "I have keys. The property is managed by a third-party company, monthly inspection, nothing unusual about an owner visit." He paused. "I don't want to take a team. The fewer people who know what we're looking for, the better."
"Just us," I said.
It wasn't a question. He nodded.
"Tonight," he said. "After dark. Less visibility."
I nodded.
There was a pause between them, not empty, not uncomfortable. The kind of pause that holds the weight of a thing before it begins.
"Avery." His voice had the careful register again. "If we find it, whatever is on that drive, it's going to move things quickly. Salas will know he's run out of time. He'll escalate."
"I know."
"It could get dangerous."
"It's already dangerous." I held his gaze. "It was dangerous the moment he decided my father was a problem. The moment he decided my mother was a peripheral risk." She said the phrase the way he had said it, cleanly, without heat, because the anger was there but it was being used as fuel rather than noise. "I'm not interested in stopping before the end of it."
Dominic looked at me for a long moment.
Then: "Alright."
He said it the same way he had said it before, the single word that meant more than agreement. I had begun to understand it as his version of something that other people said with more syllables and less precision.
"Seven o'clock," he said.
"Seven o'clock," I said.
* * *
I spent the afternoon finishing the acquisition report, the parts that weren't Tchoupitoulas, the parts that were legitimate work and legitimate findings that had nothing to do with what she had found this morning. She worked with the focused efficiency of someone who has made a decision and is now in the clean space between deciding and acting.
At four-thirty, I texted Cleo:
Going somewhere tonight. If you don't hear from me by midnight, call this number. I sent Dominic's direct line. Don't call anyone else first.
Cleo responded in thirty seconds: understood. be careful.
At six, I changed clothes, something I could move in, nothing that announced intention. Dark. Practical. I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment: I had come to New Orleans six weeks ago to find information about my father and had found, in addition to that, something I hadn't planned for and hadn't known how to name and was still in the process of deciding what to do with.
I looked like myself. Exactly myself.
I went to meet Dominic.