He sits with the answer. It lengthens.
Then he nods.
"Good. That is the only answer that was not going to get you killed today."
He leans forward.
"Sean. What is the last thing you remember about your mother?"
The question lands in the center of my chest the way a question lands when it has been chosen by a man who has studied the file for more hours than I have been awake.
He did not say Karen.
He saidyour mother.
I do not answer.
The door opens behind me.
I do not turn. I do not turn because the man who has just walked through the door has the same posture as the man across the table from me, and I can feel it without seeing him.
Alessandro is looking past me. The look of a man watching his brother walk into a room.
I turn.
He is not me.
That is the first thing.
The face is not my face. The hair is darker. The eyes are darker. The mouth is wider.
The body is my body.
He is my height. My width. Built the way I am, through the shoulders, through the chest, through the way the suit jacket drapes over the trapezius muscles of a man who carried sixty-pound rucksacks for years before he was old enough to drink.
He is standing in the doorway the way an operator stands in a doorway.
He has clocked me before I have clocked him.
Neither of us speaks.
I do not know it the way a man knows a piece of paper. I know it the way I know weather. The way I know my own pulse.
He knows it the same way.
He steps into the room.He closes the door. He does not look at Alessandro.
He looks at me.
"Detective Donovan."
His voice is not mine. That does not stop my body from recognizing it. The voice of a man whose voice has been shaped the way mine has been shaped, by a Navy school instead of an Army school.
He sits.
"You have been on my radar for three weeks. I have been on every block of your apartment building since the warehouse. I have had men on you since the second I saw you on the security feed of a cabin upstate that does not exist on any registry I have ever been able to access."
He does not move while he speaks.
