6. DOMINIC
I have never met a man or woman I couldn’t read in under ten seconds.
Piper Vale takes considerably longer, which is a problem.
Every person I have ever needed to read, hostile witnesses, nervous principals, men holding guns they don’t entirely intend to use, resolves into a legible pattern within the first exchange, once you know which details to weigh.
Piper Vale resolves into three contradictory patterns at once, and I have spent a full year assuming the contradiction was the point, a deliberate obstruction built to keep people like me from finishing the read.
Tonight I am no longer certain the contradiction is deliberate at all.
The guest suite Cordelia assigned me has good bones, a single deadbolt on a door that leads to a service corridor and a window latch a determined twelve-year-old could defeat.
I spend forty minutes rerouting a motion sensor before I let myself sit down at the desk.
It is nearly one in the morning.
Roman Vasseur’s cologne is still at the back of my throat, six hours after he left the building, like smoke that won’t clear a room.
I run the authorization key again.
AUTH_KEY: JR_8842_SEC.
I have run it eleven times since Hayes pulled it from the metadata.
It does not change.
Jonah Reed’s ghost is stamped into a file currently sitting in the inboxes of three television producers.
I close the laptop.
I open it again.
I have never once needed to check a fact this many times to make it feel true.
Data does not soften with repetition.
Only the person reading it does, and I do not particularly like what I am becoming as the night wears on.
Roman’s voice keeps replaying underneath everything else.
You always were too emotional for this line of work, Dominic.
He called Piper a storyteller who does not know when a story is over, and I watched her step directly between us without hesitating, without checking whether it was strategically sound, because the room had turned dangerous and she decided, on instinct,
that she would rather absorb the danger than let it reach me.
I check Blackline instead.
Cassandra and I messaged nearly an hour ago, the exchange still open on the second monitor between passes at the motion sensor.
I check Blackline most nights around this hour, later if the day has been difficult, which by any honest accounting makes it less a habit and more a dependency I have declined to examine.
Cassandra keeps different hours than any client I have ever worked for and never once complains about mine.
It is one of the few relationships in my life that costs me nothing to maintain and asks nothing of me I am not already willing to give.
Cassandra: He also said “the central fact remains” four times in one meeting, so the jury’s still out on nemesis versus job.
I read the line again, and something in me, tired enough tonight to stop guarding the impulse, decides to even the score.
Atlas: If we’re trading candidates, I have one of my own. I’ve been assigned to work alongside a woman who treats a burning building as a branding opportunity.
The reply takes four minutes.
I know it takes four minutes because I watch the timestamp the entire time, which is its own small humiliation.
Cassandra: Some of us understand that a story only gets to exist if the people in it survive long enough to tell it.
Atlas: She stepped between me and a man who was actively trying to provoke me into doing something career-ending today. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t check whether it was strategically sound. Just planted herself in the way.
Cassandra: Sounds like she was protecting you.
Atlas: She’d say she was protecting the case. I’m not sure I believe her, and I’m fairly certain she doesn’t either.
I stop.
I read the exchange again, unease settling beneath my ribs at how casually I have just described something that happened four hours ago, from the exact perspective Cassandra would recognize if she had been in the room herself.
I tell myself it is a coincidence.
This is what happens when two people spend a year venting about the same industry, the same kinds of clients, the same kinds of colleagues.
I have spent my entire career learning not to trust coincidences, and tonight, worn down by a fatigue I can’t name, I decide not to question this one.
Cassandra: She sounds insufferable.
Atlas: She is.
Cassandra: She also sounds like she counted his pulse before she counted the exits.
Cassandra has never once, in a year of these conversations, defended a stranger she has never met.
She defends principles.
She defends systems and the cold machinery of a well-built plan.
She does not defend people.
Atlas: You’re taking her side.
Cassandra: I’m not taking anyone’s side. I’m saying a person who checks your pulse before your press coverage is not automatically the villain of the story, even if she is exhausting to stand next to.
Atlas: Even if she’s comparing what happened to him to a war crime?
There is a longer pause this time.
Long enough that I picture her, the version I have built out of a year of two-in-the-morning sentences, all elbows and unfiltered honesty, nothing like the woman I was with earlier who wears her blazer like a diplomatic uniform.
Those two women have never occupied the same room in my head.
Tonight, for no reason I can defend under cross-examination, they refuse to stay separated.
Cassandra: She’s not a villain. She’s just tired of being the only one in the room who thinks the truth needs a translator.
Atlas: That’s an oddly specific defense for a hypothetical stranger.
Cassandra: I contain multitudes, Atlas. Don’t read into it.
I read into it anyway.
I have spent twelve hours today watching Piper Vale defend a story she does not fully believe, watching her jaw tighten every time I said the central fact remains, watching her build a folder on her laptop out of pure spite and refuse to let me see the label.
I have also spent a year watching a stranger argue, with the exact same stubborn tilt of logic, that the truth without context is its own kind of weapon.
The evidence is circumstantial.
I have built entire cases on less and watched them collapse under a single contradicting data point, and I am fully capable of applying the same rigor here that I would apply anywhere else.
I choose, deliberately, not to.
Some questions are safer left unasked for exactly as long as the not-knowing still feels like a kindness rather than a failure of nerve.
Atlas: You are unusually interested in my new colleague tonight.
Cassandra: You brought her up first. Twice.
Atlas: I’m making an observation.
Cassandra: You’re deflecting. It’s a very specific tone you get right before you deflect. I’ve had time to learn it.
She is rarely wrong.
It used to comfort me.
Tonight, with Jonah Reed’s authorization key still glowing on the second monitor, it does not.
Atlas: Fine. Observation withdrawn. What did your day look like?
Cassandra: Grandmother. Protégée. A folder I named out of spite. My new colleague is a man who makes the word “we” feel like a threat assessment.
I go still.
A folder I named out of spite.
I think of Piper’s fingers over the keyboard this afternoon, the deliberate, punishing weight of each keystroke, the way she closed the laptop like she was slamming a door in my face.
I think of the words Cordelia left on the table between us the first morning.
Managing Mr. Calder.
I think of the phrase Cassandra just used, a man who makes the word “we” feel like a threat assessment, which is, nearly verbatim, the accusation Piper threw at me across the marble this morning.
One year of Consortium logistics meetings.
One year of a woman across the table who argues exactly the way Cassandra argues, who deflects exactly the way Cassandra deflects, who is, at this moment, somewhere across the city in her own apartment, still wearing tonight’s confrontation with Roman like a second skin, same as I am.
The logical next step is obvious.
I could type one sentence, a single verifiable detail only Piper Vale would recognize, and end the uncertainty in under a minute.
I have built entire operations around smaller leaps of faith than that.
I do not take it.
I tell myself it is tactical restraint.
It is something closer to cowardice, dressed carefully enough that I almost believe the disguise myself.
I am not ready for what confirmation will cost me, and some small part of me that I do not enjoy meeting wants one more night of not knowing for certain.
Atlas: Get some sleep, Cassandra.
Cassandra: You too, Atlas. Try to actually rest, for once.
I close the laptop.
I sit in the dark guest room, listening to the old pipes tick behind the plaster, and let myself think, for exactly one unguarded minute, about the similarities between Cassandra and Piper Vale.
Then I put the thought away, along with everything else I cannot yet afford to feel, and I go back to the authorization key, because Jonah Reed has waited twelve years for me to finish the job I started, and grief, unlike Piper Vale, has always been patient with me.
There is one more thing I do before I sleep, though I will not admit it to Cassandra, or to Piper, or to myself in any daylight hour.
I open the Blackline archive and read back through six months of her messages, looking for every place the two women might have already given themselves away, every sentence I should have caught sooner if I had been paying the right kind of attention instead of simply enjoying the company.
I find a dozen.
Maybe more.
I do not write any of them down.
Somewhere in that archive is the sentence that would have told me sooner, if I had been the kind of man who reads for truth instead of comfort.
I close the laptop for the second time tonight, and this time I mean it.