“I owe you, doc, but you know how Marco is. If I suspect anything, and I don’t tell, you’ll have to add another patch.”
A stiff laugh comes out of me. “If he thought you were helping skim, he wouldn’t send you to me. He’d let you bleed out.”
“Yeah, so?—”
“So don’t tell him yet. I need to figure this out.”
A beat. Then, incredulously, “You’re going to the mat for Esposito?”
“Fuck no. Just need to sort through some shit.”
“I can give you to the end of the week, but then I have to say something to Marco. I’d like to keep all my blood on the inside a while longer.”
“Deal.” I hang up and sit in the dark of my office.
The money didn’t go to Marco. The money didn’t go to anyone. The money went into Ed Esposito’s pocket, where it’s sitting right now, unreported, unaccounted for, invisible to the organization he’s supposed to be operating under.
Ed pocketing the payment means one of two things. The charitable interpretation is that he’s running a side operation he hasn’t disclosed to Marco—collecting debts on his own behalf and keeping the proceeds, the kind of independent move that Marco would consider a serious breach if he knew about it. The kind of breach that would make Ed’s death a tale told around campfires.
The less charitable interpretation is that Ed is building something—a war chest, capital for a move he’s planning, money that needs to be invisible to the organization he’s supposedly serving. If Marco knew that, he would make death feel like mercy.
Either interpretation leads to the same conclusion. Ed Esposito is operating outside Marco’s knowledge and against Marco’sinterests. He’s been collecting unreported cash while presenting himself to Marco as a functioning and loyal operator.
That’s leverage. The kind of information that, delivered correctly and at the right moment, can redirect Marco’s attention entirely.
Maybe even away from me and mine.
I didn’t trust Ed before this. I trust him considerably less now. But trust and usefulness are not the same thing, and a man you don’t trust can be useful precisely because you understand his motivations accurately.
Ed is greedy and ambitious and apparently not as small-time as Marco believes him to be. Those are qualities I can work with.
I think about the look again. The three seconds. The acknowledgment.
Ed knows I’m in this. He took the money anyway, which means he either considers the debt genuinely cleared and is walking away, or—and this is the possibility I’m sitting with—he’s decided that having information about my involvement with Lena is more valuable than the cash itself, and he’s keeping it in reserve.
A man building a war chest against Marco would find information about Marco’s doctor’s personal vulnerabilities extremely useful. It’s the kind of thing you trade, or threaten to trade, when you need the right door opened.
There’s something here I can use. If Ed moves against Marco, and if I can ensure that Marco receives information about Ed’s unreported cash at a moment of my choosing, then Marco’s attention pivots from me to Ed.
The two problems potentially solve each other.
I’m not sure of the exact move yet. The timing matters more than the action, and the timing requires information I don’t have. I’ll keep Ed’s scheming to myself for now. It’s like waiting for the anatomy to become clear before I cut.
NINETEEN
LENA
There’s a stretch,after Ed takes the cash and disappears from our lives like a bad season ending, where things become something I don’t have a word for.
Not normal—nothing about my life is normal. The man I’m sleeping with has a room in his penthouse that I’m still not allowed to ask about, and Alanda stops by twice a week for what she calls social visits but leaves with the flat efficiency of someone who has just done something that required her professional skills.
Not normal, but steady. Consistent.
The logistics firm is on the twenty-second floor of a building downtown that has a lobby with real plants in it, and this detail, which I register on my first morning while waiting for my badge to be printed, makes me feel like something is going right.
My manager’s name is Pritha. She is competent and direct and does not, as far as I can tell in the first week, have any interest in what I look like or whether I smile enough. She has an interest in whether I can read a supply chain analysis and identify wherethe inefficiency is hiding. That’s about it. When I do it on my third day, she looks at me with the particular expression of a person confirming something they already suspected, and says, “Good.”
One word. I go home that evening, and I’m almost embarrassingly happy about it.
