Chapter 19 #2
“She lives somewhere we are about to make safer. Do not ask for her address. When the burner gets to her, and she chooses to give it to you, you can ask her yourself.”
I close my eyes.
The wanting is so bad it makes my hands hurt.
“Is someone watching her?” I ask.
“We don’t know. We are going to assume yes.”
“I should go to her.”
“No.”
“I should be on a plane. I should be there in the morning. I should be —”
“You should be in your apartment, eating, sleeping, and showing up to my office tomorrow at ten. Other than the fact that you would flush your career and abandon Halston’s window of communication, you would also turn Livia from a quiet senior conservator at a respected institute into a public scandal involving a hockey player.
The Saint Claires would have her on local news by lunch.
You go to Italy tonight, you make her visible. ”
The truth lands like a check against the boards. I hate him because he is right.
“We’ll assign an asset to her,” Lang says. “Tomorrow morning. She will not know she has been assigned. The asset will be near enough to intervene if anything moves on her, far enough not to crowd her. Standard protective protocol. We do this more often than you would like to know.”
“Who is it?”
“A woman. Your age. I trained her. She is good. She also speaks fluent Italian, which most of our assets don’t, which is why she gets Florence.”
Not sure if I should be calm. A stranger is going to be near her tomorrow, and the stranger is not me.
The stranger is going to know what her routine looks like.
What time does she leave for the institute?
What route she takes. Whether her left hand still does the thing it does when she is upset, which I don't know about because I have not seen her in a decade and have no business assuming she still has any of the same tells.
I might not even recognize her on the street.
The thought is a hit to the chest.
“Okay. Send the asset. Get her the phone. Do not—”
“Yes?”
“Do not let anything happen to her.”
“We won’t,” Lang is the one who assures me.
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
We sit with that for a second.
Then he says, quieter, “Creed, I'm not going to let it happen again.”
I put my hand over my eyes.
“What did she sound like?”
He is quiet.
“Don’t lawyer me.”
“I don't know,” he says. “Like her?”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve never spoken to her before,” he says, trying not to sound annoyed but failing miserably. “She asked about you before she could stop herself. I told her not to read more into it than there was. I am telling you the same.”
I close my eyes.
“Do not make that into more than it is, Creed.”
I sit again.
“Tomorrow morning, you come to my office.”
“I have practice.”
“No, you don't.”
I almost smile. “Coach will lose his mind.”
“Let him. I have dealt with worse men for less interesting reasons.”
“Fitz.”
“Creed.”
“I'm not good at waiting.”
“That is unfortunate, because right now waiting is the only thing that doesn't get someone hurt.”
The apartment hums around me. Lights. Refrigerator. Rain. City. Halston breathing through the phone an hour ago. Liv’s name was in Fitz's mouth thirty seconds ago.
The world I buried has resurrected itself.
“Okay,” I say.
The word costs more than it should.
Fitz hears it.
“Good. One more thing.”
“What?”
“Do not become useful at the expense of being careful.”
The sentence hits too close.
“You saving that one for your next client?”
“No. My husband says it to me twice a week.”
Lang says, “Three.”
Fitz sighs. “Fine, three times.”
This time, I almost laugh properly.
Almost.
“When will Liv get the phone?”
“Soon, if Byron’s contact can move cleanly.”
“And Halston?”
“Sooner, if possible.”
“Tell me when.”
“I will.”
“Tell me before you tell anyone else.”
“Creed,” he says, his voice hardening. “You hired me because I don't let you bully me with grief.”
The call ends five minutes later, after instructions I write in a note app, Fitz tells me to delete, then rewrite by hand on paper I can burn.
I do what he says.
I hate that too.
When the apartment goes quiet again, I open my contacts.
Not to call.
Just to look.
Livia Crane.
There are two entries for her.
The first is the number she had ten years ago.
The Manhattan one. The one that went, the second time I tried it, to a recorded voice that was not hers.
I have not deleted the entry. I could not bring myself to.
Some nights, in the early years, I would stare at it the way you stare at an old photograph of a building that has been demolished.
Something used to live there. The map still says so.
The second entry is the one Fitz just sent me. New country code. A number I have never dialed.
A number I'm not allowed to dial tonight. The next line says, “this will be her number when she gets the phone”.
Liv.
I touch the name with my thumb without opening it.
I close the phone.
Then I sit in the too-bright apartment until morning starts turning the windows gray, practicing the only thing I have left to give them tonight.
I don't move.
Tonight, the silence in the room is not one-sided. They are out there. In two cities, on two sides of a wide, quiet existence, I have spent a decade trying to live inside. They are awake. They are not yet safe. They are reachable.
That is more than I had this morning.
It is going to have to be enough until tomorrow.
I don't move.
But I am, finally, waiting for something other than nothing.