Page 63 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Their lawyer just cited it back to me.

I check the stamp on page one. Received, 2:47 PM. Yesterday. I was still standing in this room with wet hair when somebody walked this into the clerk’s office.

I sit very still.

Law firms don’t draft in hours. Law firms take hours to schedule the call about the draft. This was written in advance and sitting in a drawer, waiting on one thing: confirmation of what I actually had. Confirmation came inside my eleven missing hours. By the next afternoon it was stamped.

And further down the same page, the part that goes colder the longer I look at it. The complaint doesn’t just know what I had. It knows what I asked for. It lists my records requests, numbers and filing dates, requests that never existed on paper in this room, that live in exactly two places: my unit’s logs, and the desks the responses crossed.

Whoever fed Delaney didn’t only stand in my bedroom.

Somebody is talking. Somewhere on the line that runs from Morrison’s office through city records to this station, somebody with access has been narrating my investigation to the people I’m investigating, long enough that the lawyers had the paperwork drafted before my desk was ever touched.

A leak. With credentials. With a face.

Possibly a face I’ve already smiled at.

Mateo has fallen asleep against the foot of the bed, phone gone dark on his chest, breathing slow and even in the middle of my paper city. The cookies sit beside the cold coffee, one star left. Outside the window the snow keeps coming down over the block, patient and total, covering every track anyone has ever made.

I don’t wake him.

I start a new page instead. At the top I write: who knew.

The list is short.

That’s the problem.

Chapter eighteen

Chapter Eighteen: Wes

I’m restocking the bay at midnight when I hear her on the stairs.

Light feet, quick, the particular rhythm I’ve learned to pick out from everyone else in this building without meaning to learn it. She crosses toward the archive room, and I go back to what I’m doing, because it’s not unusual. She’s been pulling old inspection records for a week now, cross-referencing sign-off dates against the permit rebuild, paper that survives a harassment complaint because nobody thought to poison it in advance.

I hear the shelf rattle wrong.

Not the sound of someone reaching for a box. Something heavier, something that doesn’t stop.

I go down the hall and find her on the floor of the archive room, back against the shelving, knees pulled up, breathing like she’s trying to pull air through a straw somebody’s pinched shut. Her hands are pressed flat against her sternum. The overhead bulb swings slightly on its cord, like she grabbed for it on the way down.

I crouch a few feet back. Don’t touch her. Just get low enough that she can see me if she opens her eyes.

“I’m right here,” I say. “Nothing you need to do but breathe.”

I start doing it myself, slow, loud enough to hear. In through the nose. Hold it. Out. I keep doing it whether she’s copying me or not, because sometimes that’s the whole trick, giving someone a rhythm to borrow instead of asking them to find their own.

It takes a while. Her hands come down from her chest eventually. Her shoulders drop an inch, then another.

“Hey.” Mateo’s voice from the doorway, quieter than I’ve ever heard him. He must have heard something too, or come looking when neither of us turned up where we should’ve been. He doesn’t ask what’s happening. He just lowers himself down on her other side, close, not touching either.

“I’m fine,” she says, which is what she always says, and which none of us believe anymore.

“Sure,” Mateo says. “We’ll just sit here anyway.”

She laughs, short and wet, and presses the heel of her hand against one eye.

We sit like that for a while, the three of us on the floor of a records closet at midnight, and nobody moves to leave. The building settles around us, old pipes ticking, wind finding the gaps in the brick.