“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“I’m okay.”
“I know.”
“You’ve been sitting in this lot.”
“Since two.”
“Graham.”
“I know.”He held up his hands.“I wasn’t coming in.I wasn’t going to interrupt your shift.I just — needed to be twelve minutes away instead of twelve miles.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
“Drive me home,” she said.“I’ll come back for the car tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
She got in the passenger side and pulled the door closed.He got behind the wheel and started the truck and turned left out of the lot, then south on Hospital Road toward Golden Acres.
He reached over and adjusted the air vent so it pointed away from her face.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the window.Neither of them spoke.The road unwound through the center of town — Main Square awake now in the early evening, the fountain still running, the green awning at Mae’s rolled out for the dinner crowd — and the ordinary world kept doing its ordinary work around them, unchanged by what had happened inside a building twelve minutes away that morning.
At the house on Golden Acres Road, he parked in the driveway and turned off the engine.She didn’t move.
“The shadow log’s on a federal server,” she said, eyes still closed.“Forty-seven photographs of the paper originals to go with it.Eighteen months of sealed transfers.Every one signed by Janet Creighton.”
“You did it.”
“We did it.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him.
“Come inside,” she said.
He didn’t answer.He got out of the truck and walked around to her side and opened her door, and she stepped down onto the driveway and he closed the door behind her, and she walked to the front door of her house with him a half-step behind.
The new latch slid clean.
She turned the key in the deadbolt above it, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
He followed her in and closed the door behind them both.
Chapter 22
The alarm went off at four-thirty.
He’d been awake since three forty-eight, lying on his back with his hands behind his head, watching the ceiling fan move slow in the half-light.Sleep had come and gone in pieces.He’d turned the alarm off before it finished its second tone.
He sat up.He set both feet on the floor.He stayed like that for a moment with his elbows on his knees because he had learned a long time ago that the body did better with a few seconds of stillness before it asked to do anything difficult.
Then he stood up and went to the kitchen.
Coffee.Two cups, black, no food.He didn’t eat before operations and he wasn’t about to start today.
