13. Chapter 12 #2
I gave him the diner's address. He pulled into traffic without comment.
The drive took twenty-three minutes. I spent twelve of them composing a text message I deleted before sending.
The words were wrong. Every configuration of them was wrong.
I did not know how to say I should have told you without it sounding like an excuse, and I did not know how to say I ran that check because my daughter matters more than your privacy without it sounding like I was not sorry.
The diner was a narrow storefront on a block that had seen better decades. Fluorescent lights visible through the window. Booths with cracked vinyl. A counter with stools that looked like they had been there since the building was new.
I saw her through the glass. She was behind the counter, order pad in hand, talking to a man in a trucker hat. Her hair was up in the messy knot she wore at work, and she was wearing a uniform that did not fit quite right. Borrowed, probably. From her sister.
She looked up. Saw me through the window.
Her face went completely still.
I watched her say something to the man in the trucker hat. He nodded, took his coffee, moved to a booth. She did not come to the door. She did not wave. She stood behind the counter and looked at me like I was a problem she had already decided not to solve.
I pushed through the door. The bell above it rang, a bright stupid sound in the fluorescent silence.
"The kitchen is closing," Liv said. Her voice was flat. Professional. The voice she used with customers who had already decided not to tip.
"I am not here for food."
"Then you are in the wrong place."
I walked to the counter. She did not move. The distance between us was three feet, the length of a bar counter, the width of a policy I had asked her to sign and then violated completely.
"Marcus showed you the file," I said.
"Yes."
"I should have told you."
"You should have." She set down the order pad. Her hands were steady. Her eyes were not. "You should have told me you knew about my ex. You should have told me you knew about my debt. You should have told me you knew my sister's address before you ever asked me into your home."
"I know."
"Do you?" She crossed her arms. The borrowed uniform pulled at her shoulders. "Because from where I stand, you had every piece of information about my life before I said twenty words to you, and you let me think I was choosing this. You let me think I was walking in with my eyes open."
"You were."
"I was not. I was walking in with exactly as much information as you decided to give me. That is not the same thing."
I did not have an answer for that. She was right. I had done what I always did: gathered data, assessed risk, made decisions based on outcomes I could predict. The fact that I had not used the information against her was irrelevant. I had it. I had always had it. And she had not.
"The NDA," I said. "Petra sent it this morning. I did not read it before she did."
"I know. She told me." Liv's jaw was tight. "She also told me it was standard procedure. That you send those documents to everyone who might become a liability."
Liability. The word landed like a blow.
"You are not a liability."
"Then what am I?"
I did not know how to answer that question in a diner with fluorescent lights and cracked vinyl booths and a man in a trucker hat listening from across the room. I did not know how to answer it anywhere.
She was the first person in years who made my daughter laugh. She was the only person who had ever told me my binder of approved activities was garbage and then proved it by taking Missy to a park.
She was standing in a borrowed uniform in a diner that smelled like old grease, and she was looking at me like I had confirmed everything she had ever believed about men who had more power than her.
"You are the person I have been calling for days," I said. "You are the person I drove across the city to find. You are the person my daughter drew in her family picture before I had admitted to myself that you mattered."
Liv's expression flickered. Something behind her eyes that was not anger.
"Marcus is building a conflict-of-interest filing," she said. "He told me. He said you would try to control the information instead of dealing with it."
"He is correct."
"Then deal with it."
"I am." I took a breath. The diner smelled like coffee and bacon grease and something underneath that was just hers. "I need forty-eight hours to build the case that will remove him permanently. I need you to trust me for forty-eight hours."
She laughed. The sound was sharp and humorless. "Trust you. After everything I just learned. You want me to trust you."
"Yes."
"Why should I?"
Because I am asking instead of telling. Because my daughter asked about you this morning and I did not know what to tell her.
I did not say any of that. I stood at the counter and looked at her and waited.
"Forty-eight hours," she said finally. "And then we talk. Really talk. No files. No NDAs. No conduct agreements between us."
"Agreed."
She uncrossed her arms. The tension in her shoulders did not ease, but something in her face shifted. Not trust. Not yet. But the possibility of it.
"I have to finish my shift," she said.
"I know."
"Do not call me tonight."
"I will not."
She picked up her order pad. I turned toward the door. The bell rang again as I pushed through.
"Zoltan."
I stopped.
"Missy's school event is Thursday," she said. "Petra mentioned it. If you handle this in forty-eight hours, I will be there."
I nodded. I walked back to the car. Dex was waiting.
"Back to the office," I said.
I had forty-eight hours to destroy a man who had been planning my downfall for two years. I had forty-eight hours to save a contract worth $340 million. I had forty-eight hours to prove to a woman in a borrowed uniform that I could be trusted with information I had never earned the right to have.
I started making calls before we reached the first red light.