Chapter 2 Thomas
She asked, very lightly, if we could take the road by the ocean.
It wasn't on the way. The route I had planned to the office was faster, with better sightlines and two clean exits I liked. The ocean road had none of that. It had a view of the water.
"Sure," I said, and turned left instead of right.
I caught Damian's eyes in the rearview. He had noticed.
He didn't comment. That was worse than if he had.
"You didn't have to do that," Maren said, watching the water slide by on her side.
"It's a few minutes."
"You're a man who hates wasting a few minutes. I can tell."
"I'm a man who likes the cargo comfortable," I said. "Comfortable cargo doesn't fidget. Fidgeting gets people hurt."
She laughed, quiet. "Is that what I am? Cargo?"
"For the next several months," I said. "Yes."
"That's the least romantic thing a man has ever said to me, and I once dated a man who proposed by text."
"He sounds efficient."
"He was awful." She was still smiling at the window. I kept my eyes on the road.
The firm sat in a low building off a quiet street, nothing on the door but a number. Inside, it opened up. Forty-two people worked for me now. I built that over eight years, one hire at a time, and I still walk in every morning a little surprised it is real.
Maren stopped just inside the door and looked at all of it.
"This is bigger than I pictured," she said.
"We started in a garage. Don't be too impressed."
"I'm a little impressed."
Behind the reception desk there was a wall of framed commendations. Three jurisdictions' worth. People liked to see them when they came in. It told them we’re the real thing.
There was one I never looked at. The citation in it was for an operation in the Sulu Sea, and Daniel's name was in the footnote, because the men who wrote citations put the living in the headline and the dead in the small print.
Maren's eyes went across the whole wall. They paused on that frame for less than a second. Then they moved on. She didn't ask.
I had spent seven years bracing for people to ask.
Civilians always asked. They saw the medals and they wanted the war story.
But they didn’t understand that the war story was sometimes a friend bleeding out under your hands on a stairwell while you do every single thing you were trained to do, and it’s not enough.
A minute later she looked at the photograph on my desk, the one of Daniel in his uniform, the uniform he did not live long enough to grow out of. Her eyes moved past it the way a careful person steps around something fragile lying on the floor. She didn't ask about that one either.
"This is me," Brady said, leaning in the doorway of his office across the hall. "Mind the mess. It's an organized mess, but it has a system."
"It does not have a system," Damian said from down the hall.
Maren stepped inside. Brady's corkboard took up most of one wall, and pinned dead center, in the place of honor, was his mother's recipe for Welsh stew. It was printed out and held up with a thumbtack shaped like a little green shamrock.
Maren laughed at the thumbtack.
"My mother mailed me that tack," Brady said. "She is very concerned that I'll forget where I come from."
"Where do you come from?"
"Boston, by way of a small town in Wales my grandmother never shut up about. The stew is not optional. You'll have it eventually. Everyone does."
"That sounds like a threat."
"It's a promise," Brady said. "There's a difference."
Damian's office was at the end of the hall, and it was the opposite of Brady's. It was a clean desk, with nothing on it except a child's drawing. It was in a frame that costed more than the drawing had any business being kept in. It was a house and a yellow sun in the corner.
"Conference room's this way," Damian said.
We did the contract at the long table.
I took the front half. "Chain of command is here. When you leave the house, here is who knows, and here is the order things happen in."
"You really do love an order of operations," she said.
"It's the only thing that has ever kept anybody alive."
Brady took the next part. "This is the fun stuff. The lifestyle. What we need you to tell us before you do it, not after. How meals work. What you get to keep doing without one of us breathing down your neck, which is more than you'd think."
"What do I get to keep doing?"
"Showering alone," Brady said. "Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"I'm kidding, mostly."
"You're a problem," she told him with a laugh.
"I am the firm's problem," he said proudly. "I'm contractually their problem. It's in here somewhere."
Damian took the last part without being handed it. "Your email forwards through me now. And a burner, here, in case you ever need to reach us with no record of it."
"Why would I need that?"
"You won't," Damian said. "Until you do. And then you'll be glad it's in the drawer."
We went back and forth like that for an hour. None of us planned who would take which section. We never did. We’d been finishing each other's sentences for fifteen years, and at some point it stopped being a skill and turned into a language.
I caught Maren watching us do it. She had a small smile.
"Can I ask how the three of you started this?" she said, when the pages were signed and stacked. "The real version. Not the one on your website."
The other two looked at me. They always let me take this one.
I gave her the clean answer first. "Three guys with the same training and no good options. We pooled what we had. We got lucky early."
She just looked at me and waited. So I gave her the real one.
"I came home from my last deployment with nothing left," I said.
"Nothing in the way where you have spent it all and there is no more.
Brady came home from burying his sister with less than that.
And Damian came back from a contract I'm not going to describe, and there was nobody waiting for him. Not one person in the world."
Damian was looking at the table now too.
"And the three of us did the math," I said. "We could drink ourselves useless, which we had a real talent for. Or we could build something. We picked the something. That's the whole story. There is no better version."
Maren was quiet for a moment.
"That's the best version," she said.
She signed the last page and slid it across to me.
"Welcome to Aegis," Brady said. "We'd do a ribbon, but Damian thinks ribbons are a waste."
"They are a waste," Damian said.
"He's fun at parties. You'll see."
I walked her out. We passed my desk on the way, and the photograph of Daniel was where it always was, turned to face the door so that I saw him every single time I leave.
"Ocean road again on the way home?" Maren asked, at the truck.
"It's out of the way… Fine, we'll take the long way."