Page 97 of His Wall

I picked up my phone.

I called Declan.

He picked up on the third ring.

"Jules. It's 2:00 a.m."

"I need to see you and Nolan. Tonight."

A pause.

"I'll wake him. Come to mine."

Thea was asleep upstairs with the baby. Declan met me at the front door of the brownstone in pajama pants, a Yale sweatshirt, and bare feet. He let me in without speaking. Nolan came up the stoop behind me five minutes later in a dark sweater pulled over a T-shirt and his hair flat on one side from the pillow.

We sat in the kitchen. Declan made coffee. Nolan leaned against the counter with his arms crossed. The lamp over the island threw warm light on the white marble. Somewhere upstairs the baby monitor on the counter went static-static-breath in a soft repeating loop.

I told them.

Not the investigation. They knew the investigation. I told them the part they did not know.

The bar in the Village. Three years ago. April. I had walked across town in the rain to ask Conrad Weiss why he had used what I had built. I had sat across from him in a booth and let him hug me when I came in. I had let him order for both of us. I had answered his questions about the firm. I had told him, when he asked, that we had pulled a name from the founding-era trust records, and that we did not yet know what it was. I had said the name Whitlock into a bar where the man across the table from me had been waiting for it.

Conrad had brushed it off. Charlie was a regulatory friend. He has no memory of the Vanguard. You boys are seeing ghosts.

I had walked home in the rain and felt forty minutes of relief I had not felt in a year.

I had not understood then what I had given him. I had understood it three weeks ago when I had matched the payments to the dismissals at my desk in my office with the door locked. The brushing-off had been the tell. The Whitlock I had said had been the entire game. Conrad had sat across from me three years ago and used my grief and my need for closure to find out exactly how much of his operation we had uncovered. I had told him we have a door, we don't have a key. He had used the time. He had moved his network around the door. He had let us shelve Graham. He had walked into the gala because he had decided I was finally close enough to the door to have to be stopped.

I had not told them about the bar.

I had not told them about any of it.

I had been carrying it for two years and putting their lives in the same blast radius without their consent.

"That's why the surveillance. That's why the gala. That's why the shooting in the garage. I gave him the only piece of information that made me a target, and I didn't understand I had given it to him until three weeks ago."

I stopped.

Declan did not move.

He was leaning against the counter with both hands flat on the marble on either side of him and his head down between his shoulders. He had not picked up the coffee he had poured himself.

He did not explode.

That was worse.

"Jules."

"Yeah."

"You went to see the man who almost destroyed us. Alone. Without telling either of us. And you handed him information that put your life in danger."

"Yes."

"How long ago."

"Three years."