Chapter 17 Thomas
The call came while I was in the surveillance hub. I knew it was wrong before the gate captain finished his first sentence.
"We flagged a package. Flat manila envelope. Hand-delivered, not a carrier, no truck, no uniform. Guy walked up, set it in the tray, walked off. No return address. It's addressed to Maren."
"Don't let anyone touch it. Where is she?"
"Editing bay. B lot."
"She stays there. You put eyes on that bay and you do not tell her why." I was already moving. "I'm coming to you."
I went down the hall and woke Damian, who had been up most of the night on the forum and had finally gone down a couple of hours before. He came awake the way he does, all at once, no grogginess, a man whose sleep is a thin coat he takes off fast.
"Boot your kit and meet me at the firm. I want this somewhere we control before we open it." I was texting Brady with my other hand. "Brady's at the farmer's market. He'll meet us."
"Thomas." Damian was already pulling on a shirt over the bandage on his arm, the cut from the backyard still healing under it.
"If it's hand-delivered, he's done waiting.
The whole pattern, the email, the man over the fence, it's all been him reaching through other things to touch her.
A package he walked up and placed himself is a man who wants to be at the door. "
"I know," I said. "Boot your kit."
I drove to the lot. I picked the envelope up out of the will-call tray myself, in latex gloves. I drove it to the firm.
Damian and Brady were there inside ten minutes. Brady still had a canvas bag of vegetables in one hand when he came through the door, and he set it down on my conference table.
"Okay," Brady said. The brightness was gone out of him. "Open it."
It was a photograph of the four of us, on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the previous night. Lit gold from the windows, leaning into each other, Brady's arm half-raised because he'd been about to take his own picture of the same moment from the inside of it.
Nobody said anything for a second.
"He was standing across the street," Damian said. "Look at the framing. He's above us and across, maybe second floor." His jaw set. "I cleared that block before we went. I stood on that sidewalk and I looked at those windows and I logged them low-risk."
"It isn’t your fault," I said.
"It's an Airbnb," he said, like he hadn't heard me, already on his laptop. "Renter's an alias. Of course it is. Wait, I know this alias."
"From where?" Brady said.
"From the forum." Damian sat back. "I've been watching a user on that private board for weeks.
Same handle behind this rental. I had him filed as noise.
He posts grievance, long posts, the woman who was supposed to be his, the men who took what was his, the world that owes him.
I read it as venting, but I was wrong. It's a diary.
He's been narrating his own operation in real time and I thought it was complaining.
He posted about being patient, about the next move being to be seen. "
There was a card behind the photo. "Your bodyguards might be getting comfortable with you, but you will be mine in the end."
Something in the forum username caught on a hook in my memory.
"That's from a movie," I said slowly. "That's from one of her films. The early one, the romcom, from when she was, what, twenty-three?" I looked at Damian. "That's the name of the character. The man in the movie. The one her character picks at the end."
Damian's face changed.
"He didn't pick a random alias. He named himself after the man who gets the girl. In his head he's not the villain of her story. He thinks he's the lead."
"He's been casting himself the whole time," Damian said quietly. "We’re close, but I need time."
"Then we wait to tell her," Brady said. "Just until Damian's got a name. I'm not protecting her from it. I'm protecting her from the version of it that's all fear and no answer. A day, Thomas."
"I want it unimpeachable before she hears it," Damian said. "When I tell her who he is, I want it to be a fact, not a theory."
They were both wrong.
"No," I said. "She does not get to be the last person in this building to know what she looks like in a stranger's photograph.
We do not get to stand in a room and decide, for her own good, how much of her own life she's allowed to have today.
That's exactly his move. He's spent all this time deciding what she gets to feel and when.
We are not going to do a gentler version of the same thing and call it protection. "
Brady opened his mouth.
"I know your reasons," I said, before he could.
"They're good ones. They're kind. And they end with her finding out, later, that the three men she trusts sat on this for a day to manage her feelings.
That's the thing that breaks what we've got.
Not the photo. The day we kept it from her.
" I picked up the evidence bag. "She gets the truth the same hour we do. "
Nobody argued.
"Drive safe," Damian said, which was Damian’s way of saying that I was right.
I drove to the editing bay myself. She knew something was wrong before I said a word.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me. Don't do the part where you decide how to say it. Just say it."
So I said it. She looked at the photograph through the plastic for a long moment. The four of us, gold, happy, leaning in.
"It was the best night I've had in years and he was at the window the whole time. Last night on the sidewalk… was he visible? Could you see him? Was he a person I could have looked at?"
I did not lie to her. I had lied to people about smaller things to spare them and I had learned what sparing costs.
"He was visible," I said. "I saw him. I looked at him for two seconds, the way I look at everyone, and I read him as a tourist taking a photo of a nice block at night.
" My voice did something I did not let it finish.
"I was wrong. I had him in my eyes for two seconds and I read him as nothing, and I went back to watching the people I care about be happy. I'm sorry."
She came around the console. She did not look angry. That was the part I wasn't ready for. I had braced for anything but this.
"Thomas." She took my face in both her hands.
"That's not a failure on your part. You don't get to carry that one.
I know you've already got it filed next to the other one, Daniel dying in your arms at the stairwell, the one you've carried for seven years.
I watched you reach for that drawer just now. Close it."
"I don’t know if I can."
"I mean it." Her thumbs were on my cheekbones.
"He has spent months trying to make me believe I'm alone in this.
And the proof that he's wrong is standing in this room with the worst look on his face, because he can't forgive himself for blinking.
" She let out a breath. "We carry this together.
All four of us. You taught me that. You said it about a back gate.
The protocol carries the weight so the man doesn't have to.
So let the four of us be the protocol. Let me carry my own share. "
"Okay," I said.
I took her home. She watched the city go by, and she was not shaking. I was, a little. But I had three people now who'd told me, in three different ways, that I was allowed to.