— MIA —
The surveillance reports arrived in the morning and by ten o'clock we were at the dining room table again.
It had become our table in the way that things become yours without a formal transfer — the library was mine, the kitchen window seat was Elena's, the chair by the east window in the sitting room was Viktor's when he was in the house, and the dining room table with its spread of files and photographs and printed timelines had become the place where the three of us worked. Damien on one side, Danny and I on the other, the investigation between us like a third presence that had been living in the house longer than any of us.
Danny had gone home the night before and come back at nine with a coffee he had not offered to share and new information he had.
He was getting better at arriving — less uncertain at the door, less checking to see if he was welcome, more like someone who had decided he belonged somewhere and was acting accordingly. I liked that. It reminded me of Ryan, who had never once in his life waited to be invited somewhere he had already decided he was going.
We worked through the morning.
The new surveillance confirmed what Damien had suspected — Marco was accelerating. Three meetings in five days with contacts outside his established network, each one shorter than the last, each one at a different location.
"The pattern of a man who was preparing for something and was trying not to leave a trail while doing it. The pattern," Damien said quietly "of someone who was running out of time and knew it."
"He suspects something," Danny said. "He does not know what but he feels it."
"He has felt it for weeks," Damien said. "He is too good not to have felt it. The question is what he decides to do with the feeling."
"He could run," I said.
"He could." Damien looked at the map. "But running would mean leaving Ferrante. And leaving Ferrante at this stage would cost him more than staying."
"So he accelerates instead," I said. "Tries to finish whatever he was building before you close the gap."
Damien looked at me across the table.
He did that sometimes — looked at me like he was recalibrating something, like I had said the thing he had been thinking and the fact of that was information he was still deciding what to do with.
"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."
Danny left at noon for a meeting with one of his contacts — the woman who had identified the unconnected photograph the night before, who had more to give and was willing to give it in person but not over any digital channel.
The house went quiet after he left.
Damien stayed at the table. I stayed at the table. The files were still spread between us and there was still work to do and neither of us had any reason to move, which was a perfectly functional explanation for why we were both still sitting there and was not, I was becoming increasingly aware, the only explanation.
I pulled a new file toward me and opened it.
He pulled a different one toward him.
We worked.
The thing about working in close proximity with someone for hours at a time over several weeks is that you stop noticing the proximity and then, at unexpected moments, start noticing it very much.
I had stopped noticing it somewhere around the second week. The table was the table. The files were the files. Damien across from me was simply part of the working environment, the same way the light from the window was part of the working environment and the sound of Viktor in the corridor was part of the working environment.
Then he reached across the table for a document near my elbow and his hand passed close to mine and I noticed.
Not in a dramatic way. In a very quiet, very specific way — the kind of noticing that does not announce itself but simply exists, a heightened awareness of the few inches between his hand and mine as he picked up the document and straightened and went back to reading. I looked at the table where his hand had been. Then I looked at my own hand. Then I went back to my file.
He said nothing.
I said nothing.
The work continued.
An hour later he said "Come look at this."
He had pushed a set of photographs to the center of the table and was leaning over them with a pen, marking something in the margin of a printed timeline. I stood up and came around the table to his side — which was the natural thing to do, the efficient thing, there was no reason to look at something from across a table when you could simply stand beside the person looking at it — and stood next to him and looked at the photographs.
He was close.
Not inappropriately. Not more than the situation required. But close enough that I could see the slight tension in his jaw when he was concentrating, close enough that when he pointed to something on the timeline his arm crossed briefly in front of me and I felt the movement before I saw it.
"This meeting," he said, pointing to a circled date. "Three days ago. Marco met someone at the south warehouse — we have exterior surveillance only, no audio, but the contact was there for forty minutes. That is too long for an update. That is planning."
"Planning for what?"
He was quiet for a moment.
Up close, in the afternoon light from the window, there were things about his face I had not let myself notice from across the table. The faint line between his brows when he was thinking through something difficult. The way his eyes moved across the documents — not scanning, actually reading, taking in everything with the thoroughness of a man who did not allow himself to miss things.
He turned his head and found me looking at him.
Neither of us moved.
The distance between us was the distance of two people standing over the same table looking at the same documents which was a perfectly ordinary distance and felt, in that specific moment, like something else entirely.
"Planning to disappear," he said. "Or planning to act first. One of those two."
His voice was even.
I was not sure mine would be so I did not say anything immediately.
I looked back at the photographs.
"Which do you think?" I asked.
A pause. He was still looking at the side of my face. I could feel it.
"Act first," he said. "Marco is not the kind of man who runs when he still has options. He will push before he retreats."
"Then we need to move before he does."
"Yes."
I turned back to look at him and he was still close and still looking at me and there was something in his expression that was not the careful controlled blankness he usually maintained — something that had gotten through, briefly, before he moved it back to where he kept it.
I registered it.
Filed it.
Went back to the table and sat down and opened the next file.
We worked until Danny came back at four with the information from his contact.
The information was good — a meeting time, a location, a name that connected two of the threads we had been pulling for weeks. Danny set it on the table with the expression of someone who has just completed something and is allowing himself a moment to feel it before moving to the next thing.
Damien looked at the information for a long moment.
Then he looked at me.
Then he said: "Three days."
Danny and I looked at each other.
"Three days until what?" Danny asked.
"Until we move on Marco," Damien said. "We have what we need. Three days to prepare and then it ends."
The room was very quiet.
Three days.
I thought about Ryan's letter on my nightstand. About the worn envelope and the three paragraphs and the name written in large slightly uneven letters across the front.
Three days.
About time.
That evening I went to the library and could not read.
I sat in the chair with the Dostoevsky open on my knee and read the same page three times and thought about close quarters and the distance between two people's hands over a table and the thing that had gotten through his expression in the afternoon light that he had moved back before I could name it.
I thought about three days.
I thought about what came after three days.
I did not know what came after three days.
I had stopped being able to picture a version of after that made sense without this house in it.
That was information I was not ready to do anything with yet.