Chapter 25 Damian
I had not slept past the early hours since the photograph arrived, and the war room knew it.
The forum handle posted again near dawn for the first time in weeks.
The other members read it as venting, a paragraph of grievance about being misunderstood by a world that owed him better.
I read it the way I read everything attached to that man, against the filmography I now knew better than my own service record. I found the thing buried in it.
He had quoted a line. Unattributed, but I knew it. It was from the romcom Maren made at twenty-two, the one his handle was a callback to, and the line came from a scene set at a premiere.
I sat back from the monitor for a moment. Then I went and woke Thomas.
"He's announcing," I said.
Thomas was upright before his eyes were fully open, which was a skill the rest of us had given up envying. "Show me."
By the time the sun was properly up, Chen was at the kitchen island with wet hair and a borrowed mug, and we built the thing in the shorthand of people who had built things like it before.
"The catering sub still hires through a screen door," Chen said. "Anyone with a pulse and a fake cert gets in."
"Leave it broken," I said. "And the forged credential his alias bought last week. Leave that live. We build the whole net around the one hole and we stand in it."
"You want to invite him in," Brady said. He'd come down quiet. "That's the plan. We open a door for the man."
"We open one door we control," I said. "Better than him finding one we don't."
"My vow doesn't have a clause for that, Damian." Brady's jaw was set. "It doesn't say let him get within a mile."
"And a premiere he avoids doesn't end this," I said. "It just moves it to a day we haven't planned for."
Thomas didn't overrule either of us. He put his coffee down and used the rule from the editing bay, the one he'd made after the package.
"Maren decides," he said. "She doesn't get decided for. Brief her. All of it. Soften nothing."
So we did. Laptop open on the dining table, the post on the screen, the map of the net, the hole in it drawn in red. She read it twice. She asked the right questions in the right order, which I had stopped being surprised by and started being undone by.
"Where's the hole?" she said. "Who stands in it? What happens if he doesn't follow the script and improvises?"
I answered each one, and she listened.
Then she voted for the trap, and she turned to Brady, and she put her hand flat on his forearm.
"I'm not asking you to let him near me," she said. "I'm asking you to be the reason it doesn't matter that he tried."
Brady looked at her hand on his arm for a long moment. "That's a low blow," he said. "Using my own vow on me."
"I learned it from your mother's recipe book," she said. "Less salt, more conviction."
He laughed, finally, and it was a real one, and the room let its shoulders down.
The comedy arrived at dinner, the way it does in this house, riding in on something that should have been small.
Brady was mid-rant about premiere catering when he produced a six-pack of the cucumber wheat beer and set it on the table like a peace offering.
"Morale," he said. "We've earned it. The good stuff. The cucumber."
And I, running on too little sleep and no diplomacy, finally told the truth.
"I have hated that beer since the night on the patio," I said.
The table went still in a new way.
"You what?" Brady said.
"I’ve been decanting it into the planter for months, whenever your back was turned."
"The planter!" Brady put a hand to his chest. "The thriving planter? On the patio?"
"It's thriving because of the beer, Brady. I've been feeding your terrible beer to a fern, and the fern is the only one of us being honest about how it tastes."
"Thomas!" Brady wheeled on him. "Did you know about this conspiracy?"
Thomas took a long, traitorous sip of water. "Since week two. You were so happy, and so we made a judgment call."
Maren laughed so hard she had to put her fork down and grip the edge of the table.
"I demand an itemized apology," Brady said. "Per beer, with dates."
"I kept no records," I lied.
"He kept records," Maren said, wiping her eyes. "Look at his face. He has a spreadsheet."
Later, near the middle of the night, she found me in the war room, except the monitors were dark. The laptop was playing her indie film. The central monologue, the one all three of us had separately confessed to watching alone, was on the screen.
She closed the laptop without asking. She took my hand and led me up the stairs, returning the favor from the night I'd led her up them, and she did not say anything about how tired I looked, which was its own mercy.
At her door I stopped her.
"The mug will be outside in the morning," I said. "Same as always. Milk first."
"I'm counting on it," she said.
"But the note won't be." I held her eyes, which cost me. "The note that comes with tomorrow's tea is the last one I'm going to write you. After the premiere in a few weeks, when this is finished, I'm going to say the things out loud instead. To your face, where you can see I mean them."
She went very still for a moment. Then she reached up and kissed me in the hallway, unhurried. I held the small of her back and let myself, for once, stand in the open doorway without counting the exits.