21. Elena
ELENA
Ash's backyard smelled like lighter fluid and cut grass, and for the first time in a week, nobody in it was thinking about redacted case files.
Or that was the theory. I stood at the fence with a beer sweating in my hand and watched Sergei examine a bag of charcoal like it had personally wronged him.
"You could just use the propane one," Ash said, nodding at the sleek grill sitting untouched by the back door. "It's right there. It has a temperature gauge. It's basically a cybersecurity product."
"Charcoal is correct," Sergei said, without looking up. "Propane is a shortcut. Shortcuts are how systems fail."
"It's a hamburger, man."
"Everything is a system until it isn't."
Jaz snorted from the patio chair she'd claimed like territory, sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though the sun was already low and orange over the hills.
"See, this is what I mean," she said to me, loud enough for the whole yard to hear.
"He talks about meat like it's a hostile network. Does he do this during sex?"
"Jaz."
"I'm asking for research purposes."
Sergei set down the bag of charcoal with the unhurried precision of a man declining to dignify a question with an answer.
He went back to building his fire with an engineer's exactness, briquettes stacked in a pattern that had clearly been optimized in his head before his hands ever touched anything.
I loved the way he treated a barbecue like a threat model more than I probably should have admitted out loud.
The plan had been small: just me, Sergei, Ash, Jaz, a case of beer, and whatever meat Ash could be convinced not to burn.
It was the first time in a week that anyone had suggested doing something that wasn't work, wasn't a screenshot, wasn't a low, careful conversation behind a closed door about what a man named Wren might or might not be hiding.
Nobody had said that part out loud when Ash floated the idea over the group chat.
Nobody had needed to. I'd said yes before I finished reading the message.
By the time the sun dropped behind the ridge, the yard had somehow acquired two more people.
There was a woman named Nadia from Halcyon's threat intel team, who'd shown up with a six-pack and a folding table, and a guy named Dez who worked in facilities, the one Ash introduced only as "the man who knows where the bodies are buried, administratively speaking. "
Someone had brought a speaker. Someone else had brought a playlist, and that was where things started to go wrong for Jaz.
"Absolutely not," she said, halfway through the third song, standing up so fast her chair scraped against the concrete. "Whose aux is this?"
"Mine," Dez said, not looking remotely apologetic.
"This is the fourth song about a truck. In a row. We are not near a truck. There has been no truck sighted at this establishment."
"It's a mood," Dez said.
"It's a crime," Jaz said, and reached for the phone connected to the speaker with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that another person might object.
Ash got there first. He didn't grab the phone so much as materialize between Jaz and it, holding his own out like a shield.
"Absolutely not," he said, echoing her without seeming to notice he'd done it. "You do not get aux privileges. I've heard your car. You had a playlist called Sad Girl Autumn playing in the dead heat of summer."
Jaz's mouth dropped open. "That is a lie. That is slander. I will be seeking legal counsel."
"I was in the passenger seat, Jaz. I watched it happen."
"You were in my car for eleven minutes."
"Eleven formative minutes."
For a second I thought she might actually throw something at him, and then, instead, she laughed.
It surprised her as much as it seemed to surprise him, a short, unwilling bark of a laugh that she tried to smother by pressing the back of her hand to her mouth.
Ash looked entirely too pleased with himself about it, the way a man looks when he's found a lever nobody else knew existed.
"Fine," Jaz said, recovering, jabbing a finger at him. "But if one more truck song plays, I am walking into that house and unplugging the router just to watch this whole party die."
"That's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me all year," Ash said, and put his phone in his back pocket, out of her reach, close enough to his body that she'd have to actually try if she wanted it.
She didn't try. She sat back down two feet closer to him than she'd been before, and if she noticed, she didn't say anything about it.
I caught Sergei watching the whole exchange over the top of the grill, one eyebrow raised in a way that on anyone else would have been a smirk.
"Don't," I said.
"I said nothing."
"Your face said something."
"My face has been doing that since before you knew it existed.
" He closed the lid on the grill with a small, satisfied clang, and for a moment, standing there in the fading gold light with smoke curling up past his jaw, he looked less like the CEO of a cybersecurity company and more like a man who'd had exactly one thing go right today and intended to enjoy it.
Dinner happened somewhere in the middle of all that, burgers and something Nadia made with corn that was better than anything Ash had touched, and then, because Dez apparently could not let a lawn go unused, out came a battered set of cornhole boards with the paint half worn off.
"Absolutely not," Sergei said, joining the night's growing chorus of people refusing things they would inevitably do anyway, but he said it while already walking toward the boards, which told me everything.
He was catastrophically bad at cornhole, and I want to be precise about this because I think about it often now. He wasn't bad in a charming, self-deprecating way. He was bad the way a man is bad at something he has never allowed himself to be bad at before.
His first bag hit the ground four feet short. His second sailed clean over the board and into the neighbor's rosebush. Ash, standing off to the side with his phone already up and recording, narrated the whole thing in a hushed, reverent sports-announcer voice that made Nadia choke on her drink.
"And Morozov winds up," Ash said, "the crowd is silent, the tension is unbearable, and that is a swing and a miss, folks, that is a bag in Nancy's roses for the third consecutive round, a truly historic collapse from a man who once beat me at chess without looking at the board."
"That was one time," Sergei said, retrieving his bag from the flowerbed with the grim dignity of a man performing a task well beneath him.
"It was memorable."
"So is this, apparently."
I was laughing before I could stop myself, doubled half over with my hand pressed to my ribs, because there was something so purely, stupidly funny about watching Sergei Morozov, a man who read people's tells across boardroom tables for a living, fail to land a beanbag on a piece of plywood four separate times.
It wasn't a laugh I'd planned or managed.
It came up out of me loose and unguarded, the kind of laugh I hadn't let myself have in front of another person in longer than I wanted to think about, and when I caught his eye over the boards, something in his expression shifted, soft and startled, like he hadn't expected to hear it either.
"You have the reflexes of a man who has never once played a game for fun," I told him, wiping my eyes.
"I've never lost anything I was trying to win," he said. "This isn't that."
"That's the worst excuse I've ever heard."
"It's not an excuse. It's a hypothesis." He lined up another throw, squinting at the board like it had a vulnerability he hadn't found yet. "I'm testing whether effort correlates with outcome in low-stakes environments."
"And?"
"The data is troubling."
The bag missed again. Ash made a sound like a stadium groaning in unison, and Jaz, who had wandered over with a fresh drink, took one look at the scene and declared that this was, without question, the best thing she'd witnessed in weeks, better than the truck songs, better than brunch, possibly better than her own birthday.
Somewhere after that the evening folded into itself the way good evenings do, losing its edges. Nadia put on music that even Jaz couldn't object to, something with a slow, unbothered groove that made Dez close his eyes and nod along like it had personally forgiven him for the truck songs.
Dez told a long, improbable story about a facilities incident involving a fish tank, complete with hand gestures for exactly how far the water had traveled and a solemn insistence that the official version had left out the best parts. Everyone was half in tears by the end of it.
Two more people showed up not long after, friends of Nadia's who arrived with a cooler and no apparent plan beyond staying.
One of them, a quiet guy named Owen, worked in Halcyon's compliance office and spent twenty minutes trying to convince Dez that spreadsheets were an underrated art form.
Somebody found a bag of marshmallows and lit the fire pit, and the yard filled up with the low murmur of eight people who, for one stretch of hours, had nowhere better to be.
I lost track of whose sweatshirt I was wearing by the time it got cold enough to need one. I didn't ask for it back. I sat on the arm of a lawn chair with Sergei's hand resting warm on my knee, and it occurred to me, somewhere in there, that nobody had said Wren's name all night.
Nobody had said Renner's either, or Mateo's, or anything about redactions or override patterns or federal case files.
It hadn't been a decision anyone made out loud.
It was just an absence, comfortable and unremarked, the kind you don't notice until much later, when you try to remember the last time you felt it.
I noticed it now, sitting there with the fire popping and Sergei's thumb moving idly against my knee, and I let myself have it without picking it apart. That felt like its own kind of victory.
"You're staring," Sergei said quietly, not looking away from the fire.
"I'm memorizing," I said. "You lost at cornhole in front of six witnesses. I want to be able to describe this in detail for years."
"Eight, currently."
"You counted?"
"I count everything." He said it lightly, but there was something underneath it, something that had been the reason for the counting for a long time before I ever knew him, and instead of chasing it I just leaned into his shoulder and let the fire do the talking for a while.
Jaz and Ash had ended up in the two chairs closest to the pit, still bickering, still sitting closer together than either of them would admit to sober, and at some point I watched her steal a marshmallow right off his stick and eat it in front of him with a look of pure defiance, and watched him just shake his head and hand her the next one before she even asked.
It was Nadia's phone that went first. I heard the notification chime, small and ordinary, and didn't think anything of it until I heard four more chimes layer over it in the space of a few seconds, Ash's, then Owen's, then Dez's, then the quiet, familiar buzz of my own phone against my hip.
Sergei's came last, a single sharp vibration against the chair arm where he'd set it face down.
I felt him go still before I even looked at my screen.
The subject line was the kind of bland that companies use when they want something to sound routine: compliance notice, effective immediately.
I opened it because everyone else in the yard was opening theirs, because for one more second it was just another email arriving at the end of an ordinary night, and then I read the second line and the fire pit and the marshmallows and the ridiculous, glorious hour of watching Sergei miss a beanbag four times in a row all fell away at once.
An outside agency had requested a full compliance audit of Halcyon's federal-adjacent contracts, effective immediately.
I looked up. Ash's thumb had stopped scrolling.
Nadia was still smiling faintly, a half second behind the rest of us, the way you are when you haven't caught up to what you're reading yet. Dez glanced between our faces like he was trying to work out what he'd missed.
Sergei hadn't moved at all. He was looking at his phone the way he looked at a redaction pattern, still, careful, already three steps into working out what it meant, and across the fire I watched Jaz's laugh die in her throat before she'd even finished the shape of it, because whatever was on Ash's face and mine had just told her, faster than any word could have, that the good part of the night was over.
Nobody said Wren's name. Nobody had to.