Chapter 13
The place was a brunch spot off the entertainment corridor with a patio that faced east, the morning light behind Josie’s chair and directly in my eyes.
I picked the table nearest the back corner, angled so I could see the front door, the kitchen pass, and the patio exit without turning my head more than a few degrees in any direction.
It took me eleven seconds standing at the hostess stand to choose it.
I didn’t think about that until I was already sitting down and Josie was still standing, looking at the chair across from me like it had personally wronged her.
“You picked this table on purpose,” she said.
“I picked it because it was available.”
“You picked it because from that seat you can see the door, the kitchen, and probably the parking lot through that window if you lean two inches left.” She sat down anyway, dragging the chair a few inches to the side first, just enough to break the sightline I’d built.
“I’m not saying stop. I’m saying I see you doing it, which is different from stopping you. ”
I let that land without arguing it, because she was right and there was no version of pretending otherwise that wouldn’t have insulted her intelligence along with my own.
The server came over with waters and menus, and I didn’t open mine.
I already knew what Josie ordered on a Saturday morning, because I’d watched her carry takeout bags from this same corridor twice in the last two weeks, the same paper bag with the same grease spot pattern, and I’d have bet the truck payment on the order without needing to see a receipt.
Egg white omelet, spinach, no cheese, coffee black, a side of fruit she wouldn’t finish.
“I know what you’re going to get,” I said, before I could stop myself, because apparently some part of me still wanted credit for the information even now, even after last night’s table and the folder and the seven rules I’d agreed to without argument.
She set the menu down slowly, like she was giving the sentence room to be as bad an idea as it clearly was.
“You know what I usually get,” she said. “That’s not the same as knowing what I’m going to get today. Those are two different facts, and you just told me you can’t tell them apart, which is honestly more concerning than the surveillance.”
“That’s fair.”
“I’m ordering for myself. Out loud. To the actual server, not through you.
” When the server came back she asked for the French toast, the one thing I would have put at the bottom of any list I’d have built for her, and a mimosa she didn’t finish more than a third of.
There was a small, private pleasure in her face when she said it, like she’d been wanting an excuse to order it for weeks and had just found one that came with a bonus.
She caught me noticing and didn’t bother hiding her smile.
“There. Now you don’t know something. How does that feel? ”
“Uncomfortable,” I said, honestly, because there didn’t seem to be a version of this morning where honesty wasn’t the only currency worth spending.
“Good,” she said. “Sit with that a while.”
We talked for a stretch, and somewhere in it she told me about a sensor that kept losing calibration overnight.
I found myself leaning forward and asking about the mounting bracket before I remembered I had no professional reason to care.
She watched me work the problem out loud, amused, then set her fork down and looked at me directly.
“My turn,” she said. “I want to ask you something. Not digging. Just asking.”
“Ask.”
“Why investigation? Not the file cabinet version. The real one.”
I turned my coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer, a habit I hadn’t noticed until I saw her watching my hands do it.
“I spent six years doing insurance fieldwork for another firm before I opened my own. Fraud cases, mostly, the same kind of thing I was doing with Trent. I was good at it. Patient, thorough, the kind of employee who never made the company look bad in a deposition.” I stopped turning the cup.
“About four years ago I realized I was tired of building someone else’s case files and keeping someone else’s client list, and I had enough saved and enough of a reputation that starting my own firm wasn’t actually the risk it looked like from the outside. Owen came with me. That’s most of it.”
“That’s the file cabinet version with better lighting.”
“It’s true, though.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t true. I said it was the version that doesn’t cost you anything to say.” She wasn’t smiling now, but there wasn’t an edge in it either. “We’ll get to the other version eventually. I can wait.”
The server came back to refill Josie’s water, a young guy with an easy, unbothered kind of charm, and he told her the French toast was a good choice, that she had good taste, nothing more than that, a line he probably used on half the tables he touched.
He lingered half a second longer than a water refill required.
She laughed, easy, unthreatened, the kind of laugh that cost her nothing and asked nothing back.
I felt something tighten low in my chest, fast and specific.
I kept my hands flat on the table. I did not look at his name tag with the intention of remembering it for reasons outside the rules I’d agreed to eight hours earlier.
I let him walk away with his pitcher and his easy charm intact, and I said nothing, because rule three had been explicit and I did not get to reclassify a friendly server as a threat just because some old, ugly part of me wanted a reason.
Josie watched me do all of that. I could tell by the way her eyes moved, tracking my hands, my jaw, the stillness I was working to keep even, and when the server was out of earshot she leaned in with her chin propped on one hand.
“You wanted to say something to him,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“I wanted to say several things to him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“How much did that cost you?”
I thought about lying, softening it, and decided against it in the same breath, because last night’s table had made clear what the cost of that particular habit actually was. “More than I expected. Less than it would have a month ago.”
She studied me for a second, then her face eased. “Good,” she said. “That’s the point of the rule. Not that you don’t feel it. That you don’t act on it.”
We finished the meal slower than either of us needed to, and when the check came she took it before I could reach for it, which I let happen because arguing over eleven dollars of French toast seemed like a poor place to reassert any kind of control I’d already agreed to give up.
Outside, the morning had already gone warm. She stood in front of me with her keys in one hand, sunglasses pushed into her hair, looking like she was deciding whether to ask the question behind her teeth.
“Are you going to watch me tonight?” she said.
“Do you want me to?”
“That’s a deflection with good posture.”
“If your curtain’s open,” I said, “I will. If it’s closed, I won’t come near the street.” I let that sit a second, because it was the truest sentence I had. “I’m not going to pretend I don’t want to. I’m telling you the truth about the want and letting you decide what happens to it.”
She held my gaze a long moment, the corner of her mouth doing something complicated that wasn’t quite a smile yet.
“Then we’ll see,” she said. “Whatever happens next, I’ll say it out loud before it begins. A curtain can end permission, but it won’t start it. You’ll know when it’s real.” Then she walked to her car without looking back.