“I’m not going to Delaware.”
“You have a Diamond Ring meeting, sir.”
“Had,” I say. “I canceled.”
“Sir,” Nilsson says. His voice is perfectly toneless. Absolutely correct. He’s halfway to the door before he turns back. After nearly thirty seconds of staring at his empty hands, he looks me straight in the eye. “Sir?” he asks. “If I may speak plainly?”
“And if I say no?” I ask sourly. But I grit my teeth and swing my legs over the edge of the mattress. Dangling my hands between my knees, I give him half a painful shrug. “Go on. Say what you have to say.”
“Anna and I have been talking about you, sir.”
“For the record,” I warn him. “That’s a lousy way to begin a conversation.”
He offers a minute nod that means he’s heard, and he’s understood, and he’s filing away the information for future perfection. He clears his throat—the closest I’ve ever seen him get to indecision. And then he says, “We are concerned, sir.”
“Concerned.” I don’t give him more than that. I don’t like how this conversation has begun. And I’m virtually guaranteed to hate where it’s headed.
“Concerned, sir.” He looks like a man about to have a mouthful of cavities filled. Or maybe—more accurately—like he’s facing a firing squad. “These past two weeks, sir. You’ve been…different.”
“Different.” That’s all he gets from me.
This is the first time in five years that Nilsson has attempted anything close to a personal conversation. I have two choices: Fire him on the spot or listen.
“Sir.” Now Nilsson looks like a man suffering from acute gastric distress. But he straightens his shoulders. Raises his chin. And then he speaks, the words flowing so fast I wonder howmany dozens of times he’s practiced them: “You are a different man with Miss Kate gone. You have not touched breakfast, not once since she left. You are not eating lunch or dinner either. And do not tell me that you have been raiding the refrigerator, because Anna and I can both see how little has gone missing. Your clients have started delivering messages by courier, because they cannot get through to you on the phone. Three different people have volunteered to send their personal physicians. You have left bloodied hand wraps in the gymnasium three times in the past week, leaving me no option but to hang a clean speed bag after each of those sessions. And, sir, you aresleepingat night. It is eight o’clock in the morning, and I just woke you, which leaves me little option but to phone Dr. Patel and ask him to make an immediate house call.”
“I don’t need Dr. Patel.”
“Sir—” Nilsson says, coming within a heartbeat of cutting me off.
I interrupt him instead. “I don’t need Dr. Patel,” I say. “Thank you—and Anna—for your concern.”
“Cole—”
I don’t know which of us is more startled that he uses my first name. We’re both shocked into silence. In the end, I snap first. “That’s enough.”
But he won’t give up. “Sir?—”
“Dammit Nilsson! Even if I wanted to, I don’t have any way of reaching Kate. She hasn’t checked any of her email accounts since the day she left. She hasn’t used any of her backchannel systems to reach out to the Red Cap Raiders. She hasn’t logged into Winter Reckoning, hasn’t gone on a raid there, hasn’t dipped into the forums. She’s completely off the grid.”
Nilsson’s face is a blank sheet of paper. His voice sounds like a recording when he says, “That said, sir. You are a better man with her than you are without her.” Clutching yesterday’s tumbler like a lifeline, he marches from the room.
I wash up in the bathroom, doing my best to avoid myreflection in the mirror. I dress in the clothes Nilsson laid out. I glare at the fresh mug he brought me, and then I drink my protein shake in huge gulps, like it’s medicine.
As I pad down the stairs with bare feet, Nilsson is nowhere in sight. Firing up the computers in my office, I take dispassionate note of the stacks of paper on my desk—courier boxes included.
I’ll get back to my clients soon enough. First, I have a project to complete.
It takes the better part of the morning to build the system I need. Three times, I go into the server room to rearrange things. My first attempt at coding doesn’t preserve the security I require. My second locks down the house so completely I can’t adjust the temperature in the gym from my phone. I have to double-test everything. Triple test.
I finish in the middle of the afternoon. I roll my neck from side to side, releasing the stiffness of a good day’s work. I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.
Now I just have to wait.
Wait… Something about this feels familiar—the helplessness, the frustration, the delay.
It takes me a moment to realize this is how I feel when I want to reach Megan, when I have something to share with my sister. When I want to make sure she’s alive.
I’ve had ten long years of learning how to out-wait Nutmeg. That’s good training for now.
