A brief pause, he had expected more resistance, or he was performing the expectation of resistance. "This evening, if possible. There's a place I have in mind. Somewhere private."
"Just us?"
"Just us." A pause. "I want you to understand that my intentions are entirely..."
"I'll bring Dominic," I said.
Silence.
"Ms. Callahan..."
"I'll bring Dominic, or I won't come." I kept my voice even. "If the conversation is mutually beneficial, it's beneficial to all three of us. If it's not, then we don't need to have it."
Another silence. Longer this time, the silence of someone recalibrating.
"Eight o'clock," he said finally. "I'll send the address."
The call ended.
I looked at Dominic, who was already standing.
"He's moving," I said. "He knows something has shifted."
"He doesn't know what yet."
"No. He's fishing." I put the phone down. "He wants to offer us something before he runs out of things to offer."
"Your father."
"Probably." I thought about it. "He doesn't actually know where my father is. I've believed that since the beginning, if he had my father, he would have used that directly instead of constructing the arrangement through debt. He knows something. Not everything."
"Are you willing to go?"
I looked at him. "Yes. Are you?"
"Yes." He said it without hesitation. "But not without preparation. I want two people outside the location, and I want to know the address before we agree to it."
I nodded. "Tell him that."
Dominic picked up his phone.
* * *
The address came at six o'clock: a private dining room in a restaurant in the Central Business District, the kind of place that had a public front and a back section that could be fully reserved, the kind of place that understood discretion as a service offering. Dominic sent the address to two people I didn't ask about. He gave me a brief look when he was done, handled, and I gave him a brief look back, understood, and they went to get ready.
I stood in front of the mirror in my room.
I thought about my mother, who had spent three years documenting something dangerous and had walked toward it every time I had the choice to walk away. I thought about the photograph, my mother laughing, unguarded, twenty-five years old and already in the middle of something that would eventually cost my everything.
I have a daughter. That's exactly why I'm not stopping.
I put on a jacket and checked that my phone was charged and went to meet the man who had inherited the decision to have my mother killed.
* * *
Salas was already there when they arrived.
He stood when they came in, the same courtesy as the restaurant, identical in execution, revealing nothing about the fact that the situation was entirely different. He shook Dominic's hand with the ease of two men who had known each other a long time and had never liked each other and had arrived at a functional détente on the basis of mutual calculation.