[ETHAN MERCER — SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2020]
The restaurant near Cedars was the kind of place that had been on Emma's list for eight months and had kept getting replaced by something that required less advance planning. They finally had a Saturday that did not have a shift on one end and a call on the other, and Emma had made the reservation three weeks ago with the specific determination of someone who had been outmaneuvered by their schedule too many times.
The table was good. The food was good. Emma ate the pasta she had been thinking about since July with the particular satisfaction of a deferred pleasure finally paid, and Ethan ate the thing the menu called "sustainable catch of the day" that turned out to be halibut prepared with an attention to detail that it deserved. They talked about the dinner party, which led to Emma doing an impression of Wesley explaining prosecutorial beauty that was precise enough to make Ethan put his fork down. They talked about a case Emma was dealing with at the hospital — not a trauma, a departmental politics situation that required the kind of lateral thinking that trauma surgeons were occasionally called on to do and always found slightly ridiculous. They talked about Kojo eating Caleb's bread.
It was, by the metric of evenings that were not complicated by anything outside themselves, a good evening.
They were outside at 9:22 when the camera went off.
Not an obvious camera. Not a man with a long lens — a phone, from the angle of a person walking past, the brief flash-adjacent brightness of a higher-end smartphone camera catching them in the pool of light outside the restaurant entrance. The Board clocked it in the same quarter-second it clocked everything: the angle, the distance, the deliberate slowdown of a person who had been waiting, the phone lowering too quickly into a pocket.
Emma had seen it too. She had a trauma surgeon's attention to peripheral change; things that moved wrong in her visual field registered. She looked at the place the person had been standing.
"That was a photograph," she said.
"Yes."
"Of us."
"Yes."
She looked at it for a moment, the empty sidewalk. Then she started walking toward the car, which was half a block down. "Is that — does that happen."
"Sometimes." He walked with her. "The Mercer name is attached to certain social contexts in this city. Old money, charity boards, some political adjacency that goes back before me. Being photographed with someone from that world is worth something to certain accounts. I don't know how often, but it happens."
"Has it happened before. With you, specifically."
"A few times. I don't read the accounts, so I find out when someone tells me."
Emma's phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. Then she stopped walking.
"Elena texted me," she said. "She says there's a photo on something called Spotted LA." Emma read from the screen. "'Is that your Mercer?' With a screenshot." She looked at the screenshot. "That's fast."
"Yes."
"How fast is that."
"Six minutes from the photograph to the post, apparently."
She looked at the screenshot for a moment with the expression she wore when she was doing a clinical assessment — the attention that did not perform concern, that simply received information and processed it. Then she pocketed the phone and started walking again.
The car was in the fourth space from the corner. Ethan unlocked it. Emma got in. He got in. The car was quiet.
"Okay," Emma said.
He looked at her.
"Tell me what I'm stepping into," she said. "Not the version where you manage it for me. The actual version."
He turned in the seat to face her properly. The Board was logging: the angle of her shoulders, the quality of her voice, the specific register she was using — the direct sentences without embedding, which she used when she had already made a decision and needed information to complete it rather than to make it. She was not asking permission to stay. She was asking for context to stay informed.
"The Mercer name is old money," he said. "My grandfather built something, my father expanded it, I exist in the tail of it. The foundation work is real and the board seats are real and the name is known in certain circles that have nothing to do with the LAPD. When you appear in a photograph with me, you get attached to the field. People who know the name will have opinions about you before they meet you. People who don't know the name will Google it and form opinions from what they find. The field is not dangerous. It is present and it does not go away."
"The mansion."
"Yes."
"The charity galas."
"Occasionally."
"The people who know your grandfather's name."
"And my father's. And mine now, in the context of the building collapse."
Emma looked at the windshield. The street outside had the 9 PM quality of a Saturday in this neighborhood — foot traffic, the restaurant's light still warm on the sidewalk, a couple walking a dog forty feet ahead. Ordinary. The ordinary thing that the photograph had interrupted and then returned to.
"I am not asking you to manage any of that," Emma said. "I'm not asking you to minimize it or to tell me it's fine or to find a way to make the field smaller so I'm more comfortable in it." She turned and looked at him. "I'm asking you to tell me when it's relevant. When it touches my world. Not after you've handled it — before. In advance, when you know."
The Lopez contract, in a different register. The same fundamental demand: be told first, not managed around. He had earned this lesson twice now from two people who trusted him enough to demand it.
"Yes," he said.
"Good." She looked at the windshield again. "Elena's going to ask me about it Monday."
"What will you tell her."
"That it was a good restaurant and the halibut was excellent." The corner of her mouth moved. "Which is true."
"The pasta was better."
"The pasta was significantly better. I don't know why you ordered the fish."
"The menu described it—"
"The menu described it as sustainable. That's not a flavor profile, Ethan."
The tension in the car had not been high, but whatever small residual there was dissolved in the way things dissolved in conversations where both people had said the true thing and found they were still facing the same direction. He started the car. Emma was looking at her phone, probably texting Elena back.
"She wants to know if you're as tall in person," Emma said.
"Am I."
"I told her taller." She pocketed the phone. "She's going to be insufferable about this for six weeks."
"Only six."
"She has a short attention span." A pause. "I'm doing Sunday brunch with her next weekend. You don't have to come. Actually don't come, she'll be worse if you come."
"Understood."
They drove. The city passed. Emma had her window cracked a half-inch, the October air coming through at the speed of the drive, and the Board ran on the patrol track and the Doyle track and the counter-surveillance track and noted that none of them were present in this car, in this half-hour. That was not a managed absence — it was the natural boundary of a space where he was simply himself and not the person running all the other pockets.
He drove her home.
At her building, she got out, came around to his side of the car. He lowered the window.
"Elena's account has thirty-eight comments on the photo already," Emma said, checking her phone. "Someone says we look 'ridiculously well-matched,' which I think means we're both too tall."
"Probably."
"I'm going to tell her the pasta was incredible and she should go."
"She should go."
"Good night, Mercer."
"Good night."
She went in. He watched the building door close and sat in the car for a moment with the car not yet moving. The Board filed the evening in chronological order — the restaurant, the photograph, the conversation, the drive — and noted that Emma had chosen to stay in full information, as a decision she made with her eyes open, without requiring anything to be different than it was.
The account probably had fifty comments now. He did not look.
He drove home.