Page 108 of Lone Wolf

A fucking hair dryer roared to life upstairs.

There was a door to the bathroom up in the loft, but clearly Joey hadn’t bothered to close it, so the howl of the appliance cascaded down the spiral staircase into the great room and from there into Evan’s skull.

Perhaps this was the meditation then. Learning to focus despite—

Now the hair dryer hit a note of wavering undulation that spoke to forceful fanning. It sounded like a wounded water buffalo.

He rose, heading angrily for the spiral staircase. Joey shrapnel blanketed the top two steps—a shed shirt, a sports bra. The loft was an explosion of Cheetos and magazines and an uncapped lipstick resting atop the pillow on the pulled-out sofa.

At close proximity the hair dryer was deafening. He wondered how Joey hadn’t sustained hearing loss.

He knocked on the wide-open bathroom door, and she started, toggling off the dryer.

He said, “Do you have to blow-dry your hair for nine hours at a hundred decibels?”

“You try having lush Latina locks.” She stomped past him into the loft.

“And clean your damn room. How you do anything is how—”

“I am doing this anything as I am doing everything.” She hopped onto the sofa, eyed her phone on the sheets, lit up with incoming texts. Then she stopped herself from reaching for it and grabbed a magazine instead, pretending to immerse herself in it. “And I shall not let you messy-shame me.” A crisp snap of the page. “Wait. I amend that. I’m not messy. I’m just not psychotically OCD.”

“Keep your gear in order. Keep your brain in order.”

She threw down the magazine and hopped back up. “Oh, great. Just what the world needs. Another white guy in cargo pants barking orders.”

They glared at each other.

Then they cracked up.

She walked past him, palm down by her hip for a low-five. “If you need me, I’ll be in the Vault saving humanity.”

Her footsteps pounded down. She’d left her phone behind. Progress.

He stood in the loft, trying to imagine how she could function with all this mess around her. And why he couldn’t. And yet here he was, allowing it. Living with it. And still functioning.

His gaze caught on a bunch of magazine tear-outs taped on the wall above the sofa in a collage. Joey’s vision board. A shirtless actor with pronounced abs. A glass house in the woods. A brunette singer in thigh-high lace-up boots, sparkly blue shorts, and an American-flag bustier with sequined stars over the right breast. White tropical sand fading into the barely rippled aqua sheet of the sea. And dead in the center, a bunch of smiling teenage girls of all shapes and sizes.

He looked closer. A musical group? A sports team?

And then he realized: It was a group of friends.

Something gave way inside him.

A tearing, a yielding, a struck note that found resonance in his chest, that echoed in the hollow he’d discovered in Blessing, Texas. It was an emptiness, yes, but also a space to hold something new, to hold inside him what Joey held inside herself and to try to feel it as his own.

He sat on the sofa.

He was shocked to realize that his eyes had moistened.

He took a minute to reset himself.

Then he walked downstairs, changed into an outfit befitting Harvard professor Stanley Leigh, and headed back to the Vault.

Joey didn’t look up when he entered. Her face was fully focused; she was in her purest state, kinetic and single-minded. Her fingers purred across the keyboard and the light of the OLED screens flowed across her face and he didn’t understand the code on the monitors but he knew it was obeying her, that she was conducting.

It was the most in-her-element he’d seen her since the beginning of the damn mission, and he knew in that moment, standing unnoticed in the doorway to the Vault, that by her hand Solventry’s encryption would fall.

She barely blinked. Her fingers moved from mouse to keyboard to mouse. Dog slept in the corner, breathing rhythmically. Everything in perfect order.