"You didn’t do this."
"Neither did you."
"I had three days."
"You had three days in which you also kept us alive."
He doesn’t answer. His right hand finds mine on the console. He keeps it there for two minutes. Then he moves it back to the wheel because I-89 South is curving.
? ? ?
Two days pass. We are back in the brownstone — Petrov swept it twice before he let us through the door.
Nora goes back into remote schooling at the brownstone kitchen table. She tells Brontos about the lake every morning. The lake, in her telling, is now a place where she’s a champion rock-thrower. The number of rocks she got into the water has been revised upward from two to twelve. I do not correct her.
Lex doesn’t correct her either when he’s at the table. He listens to her revisionist history with the face of a man who has decided that this particular court will not adjudicate accuracy.
I go back into grand jury prep at the federal building. Two AUSAs, three FBI agents, and my testimony schedule. The materials are familiar. The work is familiar. I have been preparing for this testimony for six months. The new piece is that I am being escorted into the federal building by a Konstantinos detail in a four-vehicle motorcade.
Lex is in the brownstone basement most of the day. Cormac and Declan rotate in. Petrov runs the perimeter. The mole lead Nico mentioned at the lake house turned out to be a dead end.The man Petrov flagged came up clean. The mole is still loose. Lex's face when he tells me this is a face that has tightened by half a degree.
"How close?" I say.
"Closer than I thought."
"Federal close."
He looks at me. He doesn’t lie. "Possibly."
I file this. I do not say it out loud. I am sleeping in his bed for the second consecutive night, and there is a federal mole potentially somewhere in the building where I’m supposed to testify.
? ? ?
Morning.
I check in at the federal building at 8:47 AM. The AUSA has rescheduled my morning prep session. I have an hour to kill. I walk past the criminal division to grab coffee from the third-floor break room.
Marcus Andreev is at his desk.
He looks tired. He looked tired three weeks ago when I first noticed him, and he looks more tired now. There is a coffee at his elbow that he’s stopped drinking. He’s staring at the photograph in the small silver frame on his desk. The photograph is of his daughter.
I have known Marcus Andreev since my case first brought me into this building. He’s the federal employee who handles witness intake. He is, by every small measure I have ever taken of him, a decent man. He has a daughter who has been sick. Hecarries it the way fathers carry sick daughters — in his face, when he forgets to manage it.
I stop at his desk.
"Marcus."
He looks up. The look takes a half-second to focus, the way the look of a tired man takes a half-second to focus.
"Ms. Callahan."
"How is she?"
He pauses. He looks at the photograph again. When he answers, the voice is the voice of a man trying very hard to mean what he’s saying.
"She started a new round of treatment last week. The doctors are hopeful."
My chest does what it does when another parent tells me about their sick child. It tightens in the exact place where my own daughter sleeps at night, and my hands, of their own accord, come together at my waist.
