16. ADRIAN
ADRIAN
The ocean is loud tonight. I can hear it from my balcony.
I've had two fingers of Macallan and I'm thinking about pouring a third. The jazz from inside is low enough that it blends with the waves. Miles Davis, something from the Kind of Blue era.
On a normal Friday night I wouldn't be home.
I'd be finishing a late dinner somewhere, the kind of place where the lighting is designed and the bill arrives without anyone asking for it. Or I'd be at a bar where I know the bartender well enough that he knows when to stop asking what I'm having and just bring it.
By eleven I'd have picked my company for the night. Efficiently, without ambiguity about what it means or how it ends.
For a long time it worked.
Lately not so much.
I turn the glass in my hand and look at the water. There's a moon tonight, not full, enough to put a line across the surface.
When I got the cancer diagnosis I had just turned thirty. Billing ninety-hour weeks and I thought that was what life was all about. I thought I was building toward something that would eventually justify the cost.
What I was actually doing was making sure there was never any quiet, because quiet asked questions I didn't have answers for, and I'd arranged my life with considerable care to ensure those questions never had the space to fully form.
Cancer doesn't negotiate with your schedule.
Six months of treatment and then the long climb back toward something akin to functional. No cases, no meetings, nowhere to be that required anything from me except to get through the day.
Carter and William came when I let them. Which wasn't often. But they understood why.
William showed up with food.
Carter sat in the chair by the window and read without requiring conversation.
I didn't thank either of them the way I should have. Almost five years later, the window for that has narrowed into something awkward to open now.
I should find a way anyway.
I came out the other side expecting to be changed in some useful way. More present. More enlightened. More spiritual. Some tangible transformation I could hold up and say: this is what surviving cancer gave me.
What I got instead was hunger.
Aggressive and persistent.
The need to be in the middle of things, to feel something real and immediate before it could be taken away again.
The debauchery, as Carter called it once, with that single raised eyebrow, that meant he had more to say but was choosing not to. He wasn't wrong.
Neither is William, who understands the why and is waiting for me to stop needing it.
The harder part is what's underneath that hunger.
The void. Not depression. Not grief exactly. Something closer to what happens when you arrive at the end of a long emergency and find that the emergency was the thing holding everything together. The emergency gave purpose.
Without it I keep moving, but the movement doesn't point anywhere. Most days that's fine. Tonight isn't, for no reason I can specifically name.
The five-year mark is three months out.
My oncologist is a practical man and he was precise about what the number means.
I'm not living inside it the way I was two years ago, waking at three in the morning running probability calculations I couldn't stop.
But it's there on the horizon, a red line I feel without looking at directly. Three months.
I tip the glass back and finish the last of it.
Something soft brushes against my ankle.
I look down. The cat is on the balcony floor, looking up at me with the patience of an animal that knows it doesn't live here but has decided that fact is irrelevant.
Grey tabby, unremarkable except that it keeps appearing.
Started six weeks ago. Shows up often enough that I've started leaving the balcony door cracked.
"You're going to need something better than that look," I tell him.
He meows. Once, with conviction.
I look at him for a moment. Then I pick up my glass and go inside.
The refrigerator is mostly empty, the proof that my life takes me out of the house most nights. Half a wheel of brie, a packet of sliced ham, condiments that have been there longer than I want to admit.
I pull out the ham, fold two slices onto a saucer, and put it on the floor. A bowl of milk beside it. The cat has followed me in, without hesitation and is already at the saucer with the certainty of an animal that has never once questioned whether it would be fed.
I lean against the counter and watch him eat.
I'm thirty-six years old, feeding a stray cat on a Friday night while Miles Davis plays from the living room.
Have I become the proverbial cat lady? What is the equivalent for a man?
My phone buzzes on the counter. I lean over to see the caller ID.
Sienna.
I smile to myself and I pick it up.
"If you're calling to cancel tomorrow’s dinner," I say, "it's too late. The private jet's already—."
"Adrian." Her voice is wrong. "I need your help."
Noise in the background. Voices. Something metal on metal.
Everything I was about to say vanishes. "Tell me."
"I'm at the East Arroyo Police Station." A pause, short and controlled. "I’ve been arrested."
I'm already moving. Keys off the bowl in the hall credenza. Phone against my shoulder, deliberate about what comes next.
"Don't tell them anything. Not one word. You understand? I'm on my way."
"Okay."
Her voice is steady but I can hear that she is scared.
The line drops.
I'm already in the garage, getting on my Porsche and I was never more happy that I gave in to the whim of buying a fast car.
I back out and the city starts going past the windows. The PCH on a Friday night, other headlights, the Pacific dark and flat on the left, people outside bars. I push past the speed I should be doing and the engine doesn't object.
I tell the system to call Captain Elena Ramirez.
Two rings.
"Kade." End of a long shift, answering anyway. That's who she is.
"Sorry for the late hour. I have a client at your station, Sienna Cross. I'd like the basics before I walk in blind."
Keyboard. Papers moving. The car speakers bring it close.
"Cross." She finds it. "Misdemeanor. Trespassing charge." More clicks. "There's a note. Possible weapons on the scene."
The grip on the steering wheel tightens and I feel my pulse in the palms of my hands.
"Weapons?"
"That's what the note says." Reading it herself, by the sound of it. "From the arresting officer."
"Elena." I keep my voice level. "Can you make sure she's comfortable until I get there? I'd owe you."
"Add it to the list." she says with a dry tone. "I'm still waiting on you to close the Mendez matter."
"Two weeks out from that."
A pause, shorter than the ones before. "I’ll make sure she’s ok."
"Thank you."
The line drops. The road opens up and I press harder.
Trespassing. Possible weapons. Her voice steady but scared.
William’s words come to mind. Sooner or later she will show her true colors.
I push the thought aside.
It comes back.
That's the thing about doubt that comes attached to someone you trust. You can't dismiss it the way you'd dismiss a stranger's opinion. It has weight. It follows you down the freeway at a speed you shouldn't be doing, sits in the passenger seat and waits.
I don't have enough information. I don't know what the weapons note means or where it came from. I don't know what I'm going to walk into when I get there.
What I know is that she called me. And that she was scared.
I press harder on the gas like speed alone can get me to the truth faster.