Margaret Callahan: listed throughout as primary civilian source, 1998-2001. My documentation cited in eleven of the forty-three counts. My name in the permanent federal record, attached to the work I had done, attributed correctly.
I sat at my desk for a while after I finished reading.
Then I texted my father: Filed. Read it when you're ready.
He called three minutes later. I let it ring and picked up and neither of them said anything for a moment, which was its own kind of communication, the communication of two people who had learned not to fill silences that were saying something.
"It's good," I said finally.
"Yes," he said. "It's good." A pause. "My name is everywhere."
"Yes."
Another silence. The good kind.
"Dinner Sunday?" he said.
"Sunday," I said.
I put the phone down and looked at the plant on the windowsill, green, unremarkable, present, and thought about a flash drive on a workbench and a sworn testimony and a sentence written in 2009: I ask only that they finish it.
I had finished it.
I sat with that for a moment and then opened my laptop and went back to work.
* * *
The new engagement was a financial forensics case for a law firm in Houston, the kind of work I had been doing for four years before New Orleans, the work I was good at, the work that used the specific combination of skills I had assembled from necessity and inclination and the particular inheritance of two parentswho had both understood how systems worked and how they failed. The work was interesting and the client was reasonable and I had taken it knowing that it would require two weeks in Houston in January.
I had told Dominic in October.
He had said: "When do you leave?"
I had said: "The tenth."
He had said: "I'll have Lena book you somewhere close to the firm."
I had said: "I can book my own accommodation."
He had said: "I know. But Lena knows which hotels in Houston have adequate blackout curtains."
I had looked at him.
"You sleep badly without them," he said, with the complete neutrality of someone stating a fact. "You've been using the curtain liner in the bedroom since September."
I had stood with this, with the fact of being known in this specific small way, with the way that knowledge had been accumulated without being asked for and was being offered now without ceremony, just as data, just as: I noticed this about you and I am going to use it to make something easier for you and I am not going to make a production of the fact that I noticed.
"Tell Lena thank you," I had said.
"Tell my yourself," he had said. "I'll appreciate it more."
I had. Lena had given me a look that contained an entire editorial about the previous seven months, which Avery had received without comment.
* * *
New Orleans in November had a quality I had not experienced before, the first time through the city's calendar, the year turning toward itself. The heat had finally broken in October, replaced by something softer, the air carrying the river more than theheat now, the Garden District going gold and then amber in the evenings. I had been here long enough to see it change. I was going to be here long enough to see it change again.
I had not made a decision about permanence. I had made a decision about the present, which was that I was here and I wanted to be here and the present was what I had reliable information about. The future would present its own data when it arrived.