9. Chapter 9
Isla
Iam standing in Matt's Brooklyn loft at nine in the evening, uninvited, holding a container of Thai food and the information that Derek Voss has been playing multiple roles in my life, and I do not know who else in my circle is not who they claim to be.
He opens the door before I knock, which means he heard the elevator. He looks at the Thai food, then at me, then at the Thai food again.
"I didn't want to be alone with it," I say, meaning the Voss information, meaning the whole accumulating weight of the last ten days, meaning none of this is something I feel like sitting with in my apartment with the blinds down and my phone full of things I do not know what to do with.
He steps back to let me in. He does not say anything, which is its own kind of answer. I have stopped expecting him to fill silences with noise — he never does — and I have started to understand that the silences are not absence, they are just him, running something, making room.
I find this both easier to be around than I expected and more difficult than I am going to admit to anyone, including myself.
Matt's loft is familiar enough now that I know where the light switches are, which should make this easier.
It doesn't. The children's chapter books are still at Elias's height on the lowest shelf.
The drafting table is still covered in hand-drawn coverage maps — a new one on top that I recognize as the Hartwell venue, sightlines marked in red, the loading dock I didn't know about circled twice.
It looks like a place someone lives in, which I noticed the first time and have been trying not to think about since.
He takes the Thai food without thanking me and sets two plates on the counter, which I decide counts.
"Elias is at my mother's," he says.
"I know. I figured."
He looks at me for a half-second. I look at the coverage map on his drafting table. We have been doing this — the not-quite-conversations, the things that almost get said and then don't — for ten days, and I am tired of it in a way I am not going to examine tonight.
"Pad see ew or drunken noodles?" I say.
"Drunken noodles."
"Good. I already ate the pad see ew in the car."
Something at the corner of his mouth. I have been counting these — I'm aware of what that says about me.
We eat standing at his kitchen island and he walks me through the Voss connection in the sequential, unhurried way he explains things when he wants to make sure I have all of it, not just the conclusion.
Voss has had access to the Wrenwood family office's internal calendar for four years.
Every event I attended in the last three months that preceded a surveillance photograph or a threat — the benefit, the soup kitchen, the gallery opening — was on that calendar.
The timing is not a coincidence. The timing is a schedule.
Voss also holds a corporate security credential through the Harrow Group, added to their roster eleven months ago, three months before the stalking began.
Which means he had the infrastructure before he used it.
Which means someone built the apparatus and then waited for the right moment to turn it on.
"Or the right reason," I say.
"Say more."
"The engagement," I say. "It was announced ten days ago.
Before that I wasn't — I wasn't under visible protection.
There was no obvious reason to escalate.
" I set down my fork. "But the Harrow Group contract is fourteen months old.
Which means whatever this is, it was already running before the engagement existed. "
He looks at me. "So the engagement didn't start it."
"No. But I think it changed something. Accelerated it." I pick my fork back up. "I want to know what was happening in those eleven months before the stalking started. What they were doing. What changed."
"So do I," he says.
He looks at the island. "I have a theory."
"I know you do. I have the same one. I'm not ready to say it out loud yet."
He nods and doesn't push. I add this to the list of things about him that I wasn't expecting and don't know what to do with.
"I want to set a trap at the gala," I say after a while.
I've been building toward this since the car and I've been deciding how to say it and I've decided that the direct version is the only version that works with Beckett. This is another thing I know about him that I should not know as well as I do.
He sets down his fork. "No."
"Hear me out."
"I hear you fine. The answer is no."
"A planted piece of misinformation on my digital calendar — something about an early arrival time, a side entrance, something Voss would move on if he's monitoring my schedule, which he is.
It gives us proof of the connection in real time, in a controlled environment, with your team already in position —"
"Isla."
"— and it puts us ahead of them instead of behind, which is where we've been since the first lobby photograph —"
"Isla." His voice is not raised. It doesn't need to be. "You're describing a scenario in which you are the bait. In a room with four hundred people and a compromised security detail and a man who has already put his hand on you once this week."
"I know what I'm describing."
"Then you know why the answer is no."
I look at him. He looks back. We've had this argument before, in different forms, and it always lands in the same place — him telling me what he will and won't sanction, me telling him he doesn't get to sanction my choices — and I'm about to say the second half of that when he says something I'm not expecting.
"If you go off-script and something happens," he says, "I won't forgive myself." A pause. "That's not a professional statement. It's a personal one. And the problem with it is that now it's yours too, whether you want it to be or not."
I open my mouth. I close it.
I don't have a comeback for that, which has never happened to me before in my adult life, and I am going to need a moment.
The thing is, he is right. Not about the plan — I still think the plan is sound and I reserve the right to revisit it — but about the other part.
The part where what happens to me is no longer just my problem, and what happens to him is no longer just his, and somewhere in the last ten days this arrangement stopped being an arrangement and started being something I don't have a clean word for.
I know this. I have been knowing it for a while and declining to act on the knowledge, which is a strategy that is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
"Fine," I say, to the kitchen island. "We do it your way."
He picks his fork back up. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. I still think I'm right."
"I know," he says. "You're not."
I steal a noodle off his plate, which is petty and satisfying, and he does not react, which is also somehow satisfying, and we finish dinner in a silence that is different from the silences at the beginning of this arrangement. The beginning silences were standoffs. This one is something else.
We end up on his couch with the gala guest list between us, my laptop open, his copy of the venue schematic anchored under his coffee mug, shoulders touching in the way that happens when two people are looking at the same document and have stopped noticing that they are also touching each other.
There is a kind of intimacy to working beside someone that I didn't account for.
Not the romantic kind — or not only that — but the kind where you understand how someone thinks by watching them think, where you see the pattern of their attention and the way they move through a problem and the small physical things that happen when they are concentrating.
He has a habit of tapping his pen twice on the page before he writes something.
He reads faster than he lets on. When he disagrees with something on the page he goes very still for half a second before he says anything.
I know these things now. I know them the way you know someone's coffee order or their handwriting or the sound of their footsteps in a hallway — all things I also know about him, I'm just now realizing.
It's the accumulation of ordinary detail that happens when you have spent ten days in close proximity to a person and paid attention.
At some point his arm moves to the back of the couch. Not around me — just there, resting, his hand a few inches behind my head. Neither of us moves to change it.
The air in the room is different.
"Isla."
I turn toward him. He is closer than I expected.
Close enough that I can see what his eyes do when he is not thinking about protocol.
The green in the hazel is more noticeable and there's an expression underneath that, something that has been building for ten days in rooms with bad lighting and worse timing and a situation that was never supposed to include this.
He said my name the way you say someone's name when they are already looking at you and you say it anyway — not because you need their attention but because you needed to say it.
Like the name itself was the thing, not the conversation it was supposed to start.
His gaze drops to my mouth for a moment. Comes back up.
Neither of us moves toward the guest list.
I tilt my chin up. He leans in.
His phone buzzes on the coffee table.
We both go still.
He pulls back and picks up the phone, and the moment closes like a door, and I look at the guest list and breathe once, through my nose. Just a breath. Definitely not a sigh of disappointment.
He reads the screen. Something changes in his expression.
"Cole," he says.
I reach for my own phone. The text is already there.
Cole: found a payment. dad's personal account, not the corporate one. to the Harrow Group directly. eight months ago. three months before the stalking started. I don't know what it was for yet but I'm going to find out.
I read it twice.
Eight months ago. Three months before the stalking began. Five months after the Harrow Group signed their contract with Wrenwood Hospitality. Conrad Wrenwood, using his personal account, paid a firm that manages information to do something he did not want attached to the corporate record.
I set the phone down on the coffee table next to his.
"Say it out loud," Matt says quietly.
I look at the guest list. I look at the coverage map on the drafting table. I look at the window, where the Brooklyn lights are doing their indifferent thing outside.
"Not yet," I say.
He doesn't push. We sit there for a moment in the quiet of the loft, and then I pick up the guest list, and we get back to work.