That, and the fact that I have just spent ten minutes analyzing her coffee setup when what I should be doing is running her name through every database I can access.
I know her first name. I have not run it yet.
I will.
Just not yet.
Her phone is on the counter beside the Chemex. Face down. Charged.
I lift it. The screen is dark, locked, of course. Recently used. I set it back down exactly the way I found it.
She ran my face.
Before she went to sleep. Before she let her body rest in a house with a stranger in it. She did the work first. Whatever name came back on her screen, she has it now.
She has my real name. She has not used it.
That is the second chess move I would respect in someone else.
I sit back down on the couch.
I drink another cup of coffee. Cold now. Still better than most coffee I have had in my life.
I am not proud of myself.
I would do it again anyway.
The woman in the bedroom is the most interesting person who has walked into my life in a long time. That does not change what the job is. It just makes the job harder.
I have also, in the last little while, started to wonder whether I have been understanding it the way Frank understood it.
Or the way the people around Frank wanted him to.
I push it away.
She is crying in her sleep.
I hear it from the kitchen. Not loud. The kind of crying that has been done quietly for a long time and has learned to be small. A breath that catches. A sound that almost makes it out of the throat and then does not.
I stand in the hallway outside her bedroom door.
I do not go in.
I am not going to go in. Whatever she is dreaming, it is not mine to interrupt.
I do not get to walk into her bedroom because she is dreaming.
I tell myself I am in this hallway because she said something and I needed to hear it more clearly. The intelligence gathering lasted about ten seconds. I have been in this hallway for two minutes.
I stay anyway.
She says something. Half a word. Not English.
Non era mio padre.
He was not my father.
She says it three times. Quieter each time. The kind of repetition that means the sentence has been said a long time and the saying has worn it smooth.
