25. Naveed #3
She's off my chest and across the room before I finish the question, sheet dragging with her, bare feet slapping the floor.
I'm already up. Already reaching for my jeans.
Her hands go through the stack. Fast, then slower, then stopping.
"Nine. Ten. Eleven." Her voice goes flat. "Thirteen."
"Kat."
"It was there." She turns around. All the color has drained out of her face, the flush I put there gone like someone wiped it away with a rag. "It was there Tuesday. I pulled it for the Istanbul dates."
"Are you certain."
"I'm certain." Her fingers press hard against the desk edge, knuckles going white. "I put it back myself. Spine out. I always put them back spine out."
I know she does. I have counted them for weeks.
"What's in twelve?"
She doesn't answer right away, and that tells me before her mouth does.
"Sources." Barely a word. "Names. Three of them. The one from the subway corridor. The one from the gym." Her throat works. "And Mara's handwriting on the inside cover, she gave me the notebook, and it's got her cell on it, because she wrote it there when I lost my phone in Beirut."
I go to the window. Not to look. To put my body between her and the glass, because that is what my hands know how to do when the rest of me has nothing.
"Names of people who are still alive," she says.
Twenty minutes ago, her mouth was at my ear.
My hands were the only part of me not on duty, and now they're already moving, already reaching for my phone off the nightstand, thumb on Nathan's line before I decide to call it.
The body remembers what it was built for.
It always does. It just waited politely at the wall while I pretended I was a man in a bed.
The warmth is gone out of the room. All of it, in one breath, like a door opened onto a street in January.
You had four hours.
Four hours where nobody was on post. Where I put it down on purpose and let myself think that was a thing I get to do.
"Don't," she says.
I look at her.
"Don't do the face." Her arms cross over the sheet.
"I'm calling Nathan."
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
I know it.
"When was the last time someone was in this apartment who isn't us?"
"Cami. Tonight." She shakes her head immediately. "No."
"I'm not saying Cami."
"Then who…" She stops. Her eyes move, tracking the loft the way mine do, a habit I taught her without meaning to. Door. Window. Fire escape. The service hall. "The lock replacement. The building super let the crew in for the water main. Thursday. I was at The Ledger."
"How long."
"An hour, maybe. There were three of them." Her hand comes up over her mouth for a second, then drops. "I signed off on it. I let them in."
"You let a work crew into a building. That's not a failure."
"It's exactly a failure."
"Then it's mine." My voice comes out wrong, too even, and I hear it and cannot fix it. "I cleared the crew list. I approved two of the three names, I did not walk the third one myself because I was here, in this room, with you."
She goes very still.
"Say that again."
"No."
"Naveed."
"It doesn't change the timeline."
She crosses the floor. Bare feet, sheet trailing, and stops, I smell myself on her skin, a piece of information my body files and my brain refuses.
"You're doing it right now," she says. "You're taking the most passionate night of your life and turning it into evidence against yourself."
The most passionate night of my life. She has no idea how accurate that is.
And that is the trap I feared over a pot of my mother's lamb, sprung, dead on schedule. The chain is obscene: the best night of my life and the breach that hands a stranger the names of her living sources are not two events that happened to fall on the same evening. They are one event.
I bought the hour of peace with the currency that bought her the danger, and there is no version of the ledger where I get to keep the hour and hand the danger back. A weapon that lets itself be a man for an evening is only a weapon that was aimed the wrong way when it counted.
Here is the confession I will take to the grave: if I could stand at the door tonight and choose again, I would still choose the hour. A better man would be ashamed of that. I gave up on being a better man somewhere around the second time she said my name into my neck.
Mara's cell number is written inside a notebook that is not in this room.
"Get dressed," I say.
"That's your answer?"
"The only one I have."
She holds there a second longer. Then she does something that costs me more than the missing notebook does: she puts her palm flat on my chest, right over the place where four hours ago she said your pulse is insane.
"Perimeter's already up," she says. "I can feel it through your ribs."
"Yes."
"I hate it."
"I know."
"But you're still standing here."
"Yes."
She removes her hand, picks her shirt off the floor and puts her clothes back on in a room that stopped being safe.
Somebody has notebook twelve. Has been carrying it around for days, reading her handwriting, learning the names of people who trusted her enough to speak.