Chapter 3

I didn't answer his texts.

Three of them, spread across four days. Not desperate. Not demanding. Just there, the way he seemed to be everywhere now — quiet, unhurried, impossible to fully ignore.

The first one came the morning after. A single line: *Hope you got home safe.*

I read it in the cab on the way to the office. Set my phone face-down on my knee. Watched the city slide past the window.

The second came two days later. *There's a talk at the Morgan Library Thursday. You'd probably hate the moderator. Thought of you.*

I stared at that one longer than I should have. Then I put my phone in my bag and went back to my seating chart.

The third was just his name. No message. Like he'd started to say something and decided against it.

I didn't respond to any of them. The transaction was complete. That was the plan. One night, one move on the board, and then I would let the ripple do its work. Kashton Lawson was a means to an end, and I had already extracted what I needed.

I told myself that on Tuesday morning while I was waiting for my coffee at the place on 57th, the one with the good light and the corner table I'd claimed as mine three years ago. I had my planner open. I had a site walkthrough at ten and a vendor call at noon and a headache building behind my left eye that I was managing with green tea and sheer will.

I heard him before I saw him. Not his voice — just the particular shift in the room's energy. The way a space adjusts when someone with real presence walks into it.

He was at the counter, ordering. He hadn't seen me yet. Or he was pretending he hadn't, which I was already beginning to understand were not the same thing with him.

I watched him. I couldn't help it. He was wearing a dark jacket, no tie, the kind of easy put-together that took either no effort or a great deal of it. He said something to the barista and she laughed. He didn't look around the room the way people do when they're hoping to be noticed.

Then he turned, coffee in hand, and found me immediately.

Not scanning. Not searching. Found me, like he already knew exactly where I was.

He smiled. Slow, unhurried. The same smile from the bar, the one that felt like it had been waiting for something.

He walked over.

"Is this seat taken?" He nodded at the chair across from me.

"Yes," I said.

He sat down anyway.

I looked at him. He looked back. He didn't apologize. Didn't explain. Just settled into the chair like he'd been invited, set his coffee down, and glanced at my planner.

"Site walkthrough?" he asked, reading the header upside down.

"You're in my seat."

"Your name's not on it."

"I've been coming here for three years."

"Then you should have put your name on it." He picked up his cup. "How's the green tea?"

I looked at my cup. Then back at him. "How do you know it's green tea?"

He didn't answer that. He just took a sip of his coffee and looked out the window at the street, easy and unbothered, like we were two people who did this every Tuesday.

I should have told him to leave. I had a full morning and a headache and absolutely no use for whatever this was. Instead I picked up my pen and went back to my seating chart, and we sat in silence for eleven minutes, and it was the least irritating eleven minutes I'd had all week.

That bothered me more than anything else.

---

He kept appearing.

Not in a way I could call out. Not hovering, not showing up at my door, not flooding my phone. Just — present. At the edges of my life, with a consistency that felt less like coincidence and more like weather. Something you couldn't argue with because it wasn't making an argument.

A Thursday evening, I was directing setup for a product launch in a converted gallery space in Tribeca. Two hundred guests, a lighting rig that had arrived an hour late, and a florist who had misread the brief. I was in the middle of redirecting the entire centerpiece arrangement when I looked up and saw him across the room, near the bar, talking to someone I didn't recognize. He wasn't looking at me. He was just there, in the crowd, like he'd been invited.

I found out later he had been. A mutual contact. Perfectly plausible.

A Friday, leaving my building at seven in the evening, I nearly walked into him on the sidewalk. He was heading in the same direction, hands in his pockets, no particular urgency.

"Heading uptown?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Me too."

We walked four blocks together. He didn't try to fill the silence. He pointed out a scaffolding collapse on the corner that had taken out a coffee cart and said it was a shame because the cart had good empanadas. I said I'd never tried them. He said that was a failure of judgment on my part.

At the corner of 62nd, I turned east. He kept going north. No drawn-out goodbye. No suggestion of what came next.

"See you, Eileen," he said, already walking.

I stood on the corner for a moment longer than I needed to.

The irritation I'd been counting on — the clean, useful irritation of a man who didn't know when to stop — never quite arrived. What arrived instead was something quieter and considerably more inconvenient. I was not used to being the one who kept looking.

---

I had other work to do.

Myles Anderson had been photographed twice in the past week at Nobu with clients. He had a standing reservation on Thursday evenings at a wine bar on the Upper East Side that he'd kept since before we were married. I knew his patterns the way I knew every venue I'd ever worked — exits, sightlines, the exact moment the lighting shifted.

I wore the cream blazer the first time. The one that photographed well and made my shoulders look like a statement. I arrived at the wine bar at seven-fifteen, alone, and took a seat at the small table near the window where the light was best. I ordered a glass of the Burgundy I knew Myles would recognize. I opened my planner and looked busy and completely at ease.

He walked in at seven-forty.

I felt the moment he saw me. Not because I was watching — I wasn't. I was looking at my planner. But I felt the pause in the room's rhythm, the small disruption of a man who has just seen something that rearranged his evening.

I looked up slowly. Let my eyes find his. Let a beat pass.

Then I gave him the smallest smile. Not warm, not cold. The smile of a woman who is doing perfectly well and has nothing to prove.

His face did exactly what I needed it to do.

He looked like a man standing outside a house he used to live in, realizing for the first time that the locks had been changed.

I looked back down at my planner. I stayed for forty minutes. I did not approach him. I did not need to. When I left, I walked past his table without stopping, and I felt his eyes follow me all the way to the door.

Thalia would hear about it by morning. She always did. She had spent twenty years monitoring everything Myles looked at when Eileen was in the room.

Let her monitor this.

I stepped out into the cool evening air and flagged a cab. My lower back ached. My heels were a mistake. I had a site call at eight tomorrow and a vendor dispute that needed resolving before noon.

I had a lot of work left to do.

But the first piece had landed exactly where I aimed it.