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After, he doesn’t do the polite retreat to his own pillow. He hauls me across his chest, one heavy arm keeping me there, and rubs a loose strand of my hair between two fingers. “Questions now. You’ve been sitting on one since the scar.”

“Which scar?”

“Doctor.”

Caught. I walk my fingers over his shoulder to the bad stitching. “Whoever closed this should lose their license.”

“He wasn’t using one.” He says it easy, eyes shut, and I laugh before I can decide whether it’s funny. “Sleep, Veda. You’ve earned it.”

The words work like a spell, and I fall asleep to a stranger’s heartbeat, thoroughly satisfied, moderately stupid, and at peace with both.

One reckless night. Everyone gets one. Mine had silver hair and dark eyes and a filthy, unhurried mouth. In the morning we’ll trade numbers we won’t call, and I’ll go home sore and smug and be insufferable about it at brunch for a month. Adeline will want details, and I’ll be too happy to give them.

Sunlight cracks through the edges of the light-blocking curtains, and I reach for a warm side of the bed that isn’t.

The sheets where he slept are cool and squared away. My clothes are no longer on the chair, and my first coherent thought is a hotel-laundry joke I never get to make, because that’s when I register the strange man.

He stands at the foot of the bed. Sixty-something, silver-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, still built for whatever job put those scars on his hands. He’s in a blue suit that costs more than my rent. His hands are folded in front of him, patient.

At his feet sits a suitcase.

My suitcase. Lavender hard-shell, scuff on the lower corner from the Denver conference, my ribbon still knotted on the handle. The suitcase that should be in my closet, in my apartment, across town, behind a locked door in an apartment with security.

I sit up with the sheet clutched to my chest, heart racing. “Where is he?” My voice comes out lower than I planned. Steadier too, which surprises us both. “The man who was here. Where is he?”

“Waiting for you.” He says it mildly, and nothing about the word waiting sits right. He bends, sets my suitcase flat, and unzips it two inches, and there’s my own toiletry bag, packed the wrong way, by hands that were in my apartment while I slept in this bed.

The man straightens and buttons his jacket, unbothered, almost sympathetic, a professional watching an amateur read the room. “You will be coming with me, Dr. Raines.”

4

LUPO

Nick arrives at ten past nine, which means traffic on the Pike behaved and so did the doctor.

I’m at my desk with the Genoa manifests when he comes in and helps himself to the espresso machine. Behind him, through the window, my driveway holds one extra car and my morning holds one extra passenger, being walked to the front door by two men she outranks by a comfortable margin. She just doesn’t know it.

“Report.”

“She’s fine. Angry.” He knocks back the espresso standing up. “She asked for no music, then changed it to classical, then turned it off outside Newton. She asked whether the coffee was poisoned.”

“And you said?”

“That I don’t need poison to kill her.”

“You’re a comfort, Nick.”

“She drank it after that.” He sets the cup down, and there’s a note in his voice I’ve known for fifty years. “She checked the door handles. Twice. Casual about it. Then she stopped wasting effort and ate the croissant and watched the route like she was memorizing it.”

Good. I’d hoped her nervousness was a speech-only condition.

“The gun?”

“Showed it once, apologized for it. She made me feel rude.” He straightens his jacket, aggrieved. “I like her, Lupo. I get why you picked her. Don’t make me shoot the doc, alright?”

“Nobody’s shooting anybody before lunch.” I close the manifests, put them in the drawer that locks, and turn the desk to face the day’s real meeting. “Send her in.”

The doctor enters my office the same as she entered that ballroom. Scared, and doing it anyway. She’s wearing her own clothes out of the case we packed, jeans and a gray sweater she chose for armor, hair up, yesterday’s pins redeployed. She stops in the middle of my rug and takes inventory of the room before she takes inventory of me. Exits, windows, the letter opener on my desk.