2. Farrow
Chapter two
Farrow
Iwoke before Dane.
He lay on his back, one arm bent above his head, with the sheet shoved low on his hips. His breathing was slow and even. The faint mark I’d left low on the side of his throat was visible in the gray morning light.
Cop, security, bodyguard. He had to be one of those. He was constantly scanning for the nearest exits.
And he was gorgeous. Compact, muscular body. He had dark brown, nearly black, hair with a fade on the sides. There was a pair of luscious, kissable lips and unexpected blue eyes that softened the picture just enough.
I watched him as his bare chest rose and fell, with the sheet draped around his morning wood.
In sleep, face was relaxed, unguarded, and I couldn’t look away.
“Don’t get attached,” I muttered, and climbed out of bed.
The floor was cold. Rain still tapped at the windows. It was slower now, not the driving squalls we’d come through the night before.
I pulled on my jeans, grabbed my shirt off the floor, and headed for the kitchen. I found a glass in the second cabinet I opened and filled it from the tap. I drank it fast, leaning against the counter.
It had been worth it.
Behind me, bare feet padded into the room. I didn’t turn.
“Do you always make yourself at home like that?” he asked, his voice still raspy with sleep.
I smiled into the rim of the glass. “Morning to you too, Dane.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“You already know the answer, and you don’t like it.” I set the glass down.
I turned and leaned against the counter. He’d stopped near the couch, eyes on me. Any tenderness from the night before was fading. He studied my posture and my hands.
“You headed for my kitchen without hesitation.”
I smiled. “And I took you apart on your couch in your living room last night without missing a beat, too.”
He let out a breath, but he didn’t speak. He wouldn’t push me at seven in the morning, but I expected he’d carry the questions into his day, running them back and forth in his mind.
“And my bathroom. You knew—“
I took a step toward him. “Relax,” I said, easy. “It’s a furnished apartment. I’ve been in ones like this multiple times.” I smoothed the front of my shirt. “There’s only so many places a man can hide the towels.”
I didn’t convince him, but he didn’t nag either. That told me everything I needed to know. Dane Fletcher didn’t drop things. He shelved them.
He moved through his morning as if I were already gone. He started his coffee and put bread in the toaster.
I stepped out of the way, pulling on my rain boots and checking my phone. . At the door, I paused.
He stood at the counter, coffee in hand.
“Hey,” I called, “Goodnight.”
He sipped. “It’s morning.”
“We’ll split the difference.”
A beat. “Take care, Farrow.”
“I always do.”
I stepped into the hallway and didn’t look back.
I took the steps two at a time and came out onto Charles Street on a November morning. The brick was wet, and the gas lamps were still lit. The gold leaf on the State House dome dulled to brass under a low cloud.
A jogger went past in a Bruins beanie, splashing through standing water at the curb. Somewhere a block away, the T emerged from underground; the rumble traveled through the soles of my boots before the train itself broke the surface.
I crossed the Common at an angle, cut through the Public Garden, and came out onto Arlington Street.
A man I sometimes nodded at lifted his coffee cup to me from his bench, and I lifted my chin back.
I went down Boylston and stepped around the bronze marker set into the sidewalk—one of the two from the 2013 bombing—the way I always did.
Most people walked over it without seeing it. I never did.
I caught the Red Line at Park Street. The car was half-full. I stood near the door, one hand on the pole, and watched the windows go black as we dropped under the Charles.
I exited the train, and three blocks off the main drag, my street narrowed. Triple-deckers leaned shoulder to shoulder. A handwritten sign was taped to a streetlamp: LOST CAT, ORANGE, ANSWERS TO MISO, CALL ANYTIME.
My building sat at the end of the block, narrow and three stories high, leaning just slightly to the left. The bakery downstairs was already going. The scents of warm bread, sugar, and coffee drifted up through the stairwell.
My key stuck for a second before it turned.
Inside was my home. It was neither tidy nor messy. I called it lived in.
I kicked my boots off near the door and hung my jacket over the back of a chair. The pothos in my window had grown another six inches down the wall since the last time I’d looked at it.
The walls were what most people noticed about my apartment. I’d mounted a black-and-white print of the Longfellow Bridge in fog. It was near a small oil painting a friend had given me when she moved to Berlin, three massive brushstrokes that somehow read as a body in motion.
I crossed to the kitchen and opened the fridge. The contents were sparse: eggs, hot sauce, almond milk, and half a container of takeout that needed to go.
I cracked two eggs into a pan, leaned against the counter, and scrolled through my phone. Nothing urgent. Two missed calls from a number I didn’t recognize.
My friend Sterling texted and asked if I was still alive. There was a reminder about a college class reunion I had no plans to attend.
I responded to Sterling.
Blaise: still alive. busy week.
I flipped the eggs, slid them onto a plate, and ate standing at the counter. My shirt smelled like Dane’s apartment. I dropped it in the hamper and told myself to forget about it.
That didn’t work. While the hot water rained down in the shower, I thought about his kiss, pecs, and dick in that order. I knew the taste of all three.
I braced one hand against the wall and let the water run down the back of my neck.
I told myself not to think about when I’d see him again. I almost believed I could stick to that plan.
***
Three weeks later, I was deep in a discussion with my latest principal, Globe reporter Wiley Priest. He didn’t like being told what to do. He barely listened when I explained what might happen if he didn’t.
We were on the edge of Boston Common, with morning traffic inching past on Tremont. The park was still damp from the overnight rain. Wiley had his hands in his coat pockets and shoulders slightly hunched against the weather.
He was smaller than newspaper readers would have expected. He barely cleared five-eight in boots, and he was built narrow through the shoulders.
He wore a wedding band on his left hand, plain and worn smooth. His hair was longer than it was in the photo on his Globe bio, pushed back off his forehead.
“You don’t need to be on top of me all the time,” he said.
“I don’t need to be,” I agreed, “but I want to be close enough to reach you before anyone else does.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“It’s accurate.”
He glanced at me, annoyed, then back at the path. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said.
“Writing,” I said, “not this.”
We started walking, not quite in step, but not separate either. I stayed off his shoulder, close enough to close distance fast if needed, but far enough not to crowd. The bench by the Frog Pond had a man dozing under a sleeping bag with a small dog tucked into the curve of his chest.
Wiley looked at them. He said nothing. He’d written about that bench. I’d read the piece.
“How long since you slept?” I asked.
“Define sleep.”
“The thing where your eyes close and your editor stops bothering you.”
“Then, a while.”
“Your last coffee?”
“Three this morning. Don’t ask about yesterday.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
A woman walked past us with a stroller, talking on her phone in Portuguese. A man on the bench across the path looked up over his newspaper while a kid on a scooter cut across the grass. Wiley tracked all of it.
“You always walk the Common in the morning?” I asked.
“When I’m thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?”
He almost smiled. “A bodyguard I can’t shake off my shoulder.”
“I’m not asking you for a label. I’m asking what kind of mood you’re in.”
He considered that for half a block. “Bad,” he said, “but useful.”
“So, it’s a good bad?”
“I didn’t say good. I said useful.”
“Anything can be useful,” I said. “You just have to know what to do with it.”
He looked sideways at me. I thought back to the day we met on the steps of the Globe building two-and-a-half weeks ago.
He had a way of looking at a person that I imagined he used with sources: patient, attentive, and never in a rush.
It made people tell him things they hadn’t planned to tell anyone.
He was using a watered-down version of it on me now.
“You’re not what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
“Ex-military, square jaw, and opinions about the Patriots. The kind of guy who calls me sir to create distance.” He glanced at me. “You don’t do any of that.”
“Disappointed?”
“Curious.”
The wind kicked up off the park, and he pulled his collar tighter. I watched his eyes go back to the path the way they always did, three steps ahead, reading what was coming.
“The ten a.m.,” I said. “I need the location.”
He didn’t answer right away. I stopped walking. He stopped a second later, exhaled, and turned back.
“You’re going to hate it.”
“Probably.”
“Source doesn’t want exposure,” he said. “We meet in public. Blend in. No sudden moves.”
“That’s not how protection works.”
“That’s how access works.”
“Wiley,” I said. “If I lose you, I don’t care how good the story was. So tell me what you need to do, and I’ll tell you how we do it. Don’t pitch me on access like I’m one of your editors.”
He looked at me a beat longer.
“Fair,” he said.
“Location?”
He pulled his phone, tapped once, and showed me the address. It was a coffee shop on a corner lot with a glass front.
I thought about what I remembered: entry points, sightlines, choke points, and exit routes. It had two public doors: the front one on the corner and the side one on the alley. The counter was to the left when you walked in. There was a short hallway in the back to the bathrooms.
“Fine,” I said, “but I’m adjusting your seating. I take the corner, my back to the wall, with sightlines to the door and the side exit. You sit opposite me, where I can see past you.
“Naturally.”
“And if something feels off—“
“You’ll tell me,” he cut in.
“I’ll move you.”
“That’s not what I—“
“That’s how this works.” I didn’t raise my voice.
He stared at me. “Fine.”
He started walking again, and I matched his pace. He was shorter than I was, but he walked fast. It was the East Coast walk, the one tourists never figured out.
“Do you read my stuff?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Which piece?”
“All of it.”
“That’s either flattering or alarming.”
“Both. Don’t forget, you’re my job.”
He was quiet for half a block.
“So you read the Lawrence one? About the mother?”
“Yes.”
“You know how she’s doing now?” he asked.
“No.”
“Neither do I.” His tone was even. “She stopped picking up after the second piece ran. I check her sister’s Facebook sometimes. She posted in August. It was a picture of a birthday cake.”
He kept walking.
“That one cost,” he said.
“It sounded like it would.”
Wiley’s phone buzzed. He glanced down, frowned, and answered. “Yeah,” he said into it.
I watched him listen.
“You’re kidding,” he said. A pause. “No, I get it. I just—“ He raked his fingers through his hair. “Okay. Okay. Send it.”
He hung up and looked at me. “That was the Globe.”
“Bad news?”
“Complicated.”
I waited.
“They’re collapsing beats,” he said. “Mine and Cabot’s. You know, the guy who covers fru-fru society parties.”
I stopped walking. “Why?”
“Somehow, they think our stories overlap. My editor said this way they think we can share sources and coordinate reporting.”
It would also mean doubling the risk.
“And?”
“There’s a meeting tomorrow morning. They want both of us there.”
“Like I could be anywhere else?”
I pictured it. Two reporters with two protection details in one room. That was too many variables.
“Where?”
He showed me the address. It was the Boston Harbor Hotel not at the Globe itself. They’d likely pack us all into a tiny conference room with stale coffee and boring corporate art on the walls.
“Who’s handling Cabot?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Fine,” I said.
Wiley watched me. “You good with this?”
I thought about it. What did I think about folding two details together while two lines of investigation merged? I knew nothing about the protection on the other side, and I always worked alone.
Best to fake it. “Yeah. I’m good.”
We started walking again. He fell into step beside me. The city went on around us, ordinary in every direction, except it didn’t feel ordinary anymore.
There were a finite number of people in Boston the Globe would trust with a reporter assigned to a story that would cross with Wiley’s work. I knew most of them by name.