“I know.”
“We do not enter because you regret something, and we absolutely do not enter because an unknown number sent you a fortune cookie with menace.”
He exhaled. “I wasn’t going to ask.”
“Yes, you were.”
He looked at me, and his jaw loosened. “She had a son.”
“I heard you.”
“No,” he said. “You only heard the facts.”
A bus groaned past us. Someone behind us laughed loudly at something on their phone.
“She had a son,” Wiley said again. “And I knew she was scared, but I let her decide what the risk meant. I give people the dignity of their own choices, and then later I sit in my kitchen at two in the morning wondering whether dignity is just abandonment in fancy clothes.”
I looked at the café and said, “You didn’t make her talk.”
“No.”
“But you still think you might have been complicit in putting her in danger.”
A woman in a green scarf got up from a table inside.
I watched.
She didn’t look at us. She left cash on the table, wrapped her scarf tighter, and walked toward the back instead of the front door.
Wiley’s posture changed beside me. He didn’t speak.
“We’re leaving,” I said.
“But—“
“We’re leaving now.”
He followed, but barely. Every part of him pulled toward that café, except his feet.
I turned us at the corner. We cut into a narrower side street where the wind dropped and the smell of old beer came out of a service alley behind a bar. A delivery guy hauled crates through a propped door, earbuds in.
I took out my phone and sent Dane the café‘s location. This time it was an exact address.
Farrow:Possible source-adjacent sighting. Unknown relevance. Moving Wiley away.
Dane replied almost immediately.
Fletcher:Stay away from the shop.
I snorted.
Wiley looked at me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“It was a little more than that.”
I shook my head. “Dane told me to do the thing I’m already doing.”