Page 55 of You, Only You

The safe house Bates had arranged was aggressively anonymous. Modern furniture in shades of grey that suggested the decorator's favorite emotion was "neutral." Abstract art on the walls that meant nothing, chosen by someone whose entire aesthetic philosophy was "inoffensive." No photographs, no books, no evidence that a human being had ever eaten a meal here or laughed or had a feeling. It was a house designed for people who were between things, and I hated it with a thoroughness that surprised me.

"The Cyprus account received another wire on the fourteenth," Will said from his end of the dining table, his voice doing its best impression of a man reading the weather. "Forty-seven thousand. Same routing pattern as the others."

"I'll cross-reference it with the shipping manifests." I didn't look up from my laptop. Looking at him had become something I was rationing, like a resource I couldn't afford to waste. Every glance cost something. "Should have a correlation within the hour."

"Good."

Good. His new favorite word. Four letters, one syllable, the verbal equivalent of a closed door. Good when I found a connection. Good when I finished a report. Good when I said I was going to bed, which I said early every night now because being in the same room with him after dark felt like holding a live wire and pretending it wasn't humming.

He stood and moved toward the kitchen. "I'm going to make coffee. Do you want..."

"I'm fine."

He nodded. Walked away. I listened to the sounds, cabinet, filter, grounds measured with his usual precision, and tried to focus on the spreadsheet in front of me. The numbers were behaving. Numbers always behaved. Numbers didn't kiss you senseless in a hallway and then tell you it was a strategic error.

I'd started timing my coffee runs to avoid his. Not consciously, not at first. But by day two I'd noticed the pattern and by day three I'd stopped pretending it wasn't deliberate. He made coffee at seven, nine, and two. I made mine at seven-forty, ten-fifteen, and three. A schedule built around avoidance, maintained with the same precision I brought to financial audits, which was either impressive time management or deeply pathetic. Possibly both.

The worst part wasn't the distance. The worst part was how good he was at it. How seamlessly he'd reassembled the mask I'd spent weeks watching him take apart. Professional Will was back, all crisp sentences and strategic thinking and "good" deployed like a period at the end of every interaction. The man who'd kissed me with blood on his hands and desperation in his mouth had been packed away somewhere I couldn't reach, and the replacement was so convincing I might have believed it if I hadn't felt the original version trembling against me on a hallway floor.

"The manifest from the twelfth," I said, because silence was worse. Silence left room for remembering. "It shows three individuals transported from Houston to a property in Nevada. The timing matches your Cyprus wire exactly."

"Send it to Bates." His voice carried from the kitchen, stripped of everything except function. "He'll want it for the warrant application."

"Already drafting the email."

See? We could do this. Two professionals, professionally collaborating on a professional matter. No feelings anywhere. Just data and coffee schedules and a dining table long enough that we never had to reach for the same document.

I was fine. Totally fine. I was so fine that I'd cried in the shower twice, which didn't count because shower crying was a legal grey area, emotionally speaking. The water was already on my face. Plausible deniability.

On the afternoon of day three, I was cross-referencing Meridian's subsidiary filings with the Delaware Secretary of State database when my laptop decided to stage a small rebellion. The screen froze. Then flickered. Then displayed a loading wheel that spun with the lazy confidence of something that had no intention of resolving.

"No," I told it. "No no no no. Not now."

The wheel spun on, cheerfully indifferent to my distress.

"Don't you dare." I closed the lid. Waited five seconds. Opened it. The wheel was still there, but now it had friends: a greyed-out screen and a cursor that moved with the enthusiasm of a cat being carried to a bath.

"Problem?" Will's voice from across the table. Neutral. Professionally curious.

"My laptop is having a crisis. Possibly a stroke." I pressed three keys at once in a combination that had no technical basis but had worked once in 2019 and I'd been chasing that high ever since. Nothing. "I'm going to lose the Delaware filings. Three hours of cross-referencing."

"Did you save?"

"Did I save." I looked at him. It was the first time I'd made full eye contact in two days and the impact was immediate and unwelcome, like stepping on a rake. "I'm a forensic accountant. I save compulsively. I save when I sneeze. The question isn't whether I saved, the question is whether my laptop cares that I saved, and the answer appears to be no."

He was already standing, moving to my side of the table, and before I could recalibrate my careful avoidance strategy he was leaning over my shoulder, one hand on the table, the other reaching for the keyboard. His sleeve brushed my arm. The smell of his soap arrived uninvited, clean and warm, and I held very still, the way you hold still when a large animal approaches and you're not sure of its intentions.

"Try a hard restart," he said, close enough that I could feel the words more than hear them.

"I know what a hard restart is."

"Then do it."

"I was going to, before you came over here and started..." I gestured vaguely at his proximity. At the arm. At the soap situation.

He looked at me. I looked at the screen. The screen looked at neither of us because it was frozen, and for a moment the three of us existed in a triangle of mutual uselessness.

I held the power button. The screen went black. Came back to life with a hopeful chime. The Delaware files were intact, because I had in fact saved compulsively, because I was a person who controlled what she could control, and right now the only things in my jurisdiction were auto-save settings and shower crying schedules.