Page 124 of Lone Wolf

“… you see all the loneliness ahead,” Lorilee continued. “And I didn’t take very good care of myself after he left me. I … ate more than I should have. And, well, it showed. In my figure.”

Evan hoped there would be some way to accelerate this excruciating rollout of information. “Okay.”

“And one morning I was taking the trash out. To the chute. And Hugh was on my floor overseeing a baseboard repair in the hallway with two young male workers. And they were rushing by with their tools and equipment. And Hugh said to me … he said, ‘God, Lorilee. Get out of their way. You’re taking up the whole hallway.’”

Voicing the slight brought the humiliation into her body anew, and she cried some more, but Evan didn’t mind, because it wasn’t performative. It was pure, a letting out of something that needed to be let out, and while he couldn’t empathize with her, he identified a green shoot of sympathy.

“So you ran him off the HOA?” Evan asked. “Over feelings?”

She nodded into her tissue.

A tactical overreaction. An unnecessary escalation. And a waste of resources.

Jack had built the foundation of Evan’s worldview—mortal stakes, mission imperatives, military history. As always he struggled to lasso all those lethal factors and translate them to this other world of quotidian social interactions. No one had ever taught him to break down the walls within himself. To let all parts of himself talk to all parts of himself until everything achieved internal consistency. Hard objectives versus soft-power considerations, force versus mediation, aggression versus deescalation, strategic alliances versus enemy engagement. Maybe the same evaluations held whether you were infiltrating a human-trafficking compound or waging a battle for the scepter of the homeowners association.

“He made me feel so … worthless,” Lorilee was saying. “Or maybe he didn’t make me feel that way. Maybe that’s what I am. And he just reminded me. But he didn’t have to. Not that way. Women need to take in emotional information at a … remove. So we can let it in on our own time. Men are so appallingly direct.”

“Only some,” Evan said.

“What?”

“Men. And women.”

“Are you being politically correct?”

“What?” His first-ever feeling of—what was it? Social mortification? “No!”

“So I decided not to react like a woman for once. I handled it like a man would.”

“You’re running psyops on Hugh?” Evan said. “To get back at him?”

“Psyops?”

“A full-bore assault to run him off the HOA.”

“That sanctimonious little man deserved it.”

Surreptitiously he checked his fob watch. Joey was waiting, and there were executions to untangle and an hourglass running on a seventeen-year-old girl and a capable assassin waiting in the wings. He rubbed his face. “Okay,” he said. “Now what?”

“That’s the thing,” Lorilee said. “I was going to post about him and all this … bad behavior.”

“Post?”

“On social media. And the Castle Heights Cryer.”

Evan said, “Oh.”

“So his friends and family and neighbors and former colleagues can all see him for who he is.”

Hugh Walters, sixty-eight-year-old widower, father of two, retired senior accountant at a midsize firm. Evan pictured Hugh at the receiving end of online asymmetrical warfare designed to inflict maximum reputational damage.

“Is that who he is?” Evan asked. “Or is that the worst of him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s why I’m sitting here. I wrote it all up but I can’t click post. I keep thinking about that one time after Ida was attacked and he was so protective wanting to make sure the building was secure and we were all safe. And I thought about what it will do to him if I send this. It’ll seal my reelection. But then I realized I don’t even really care about being HOA president.”

“It is an awesome, awful responsibility to destroy a man,” Evan said.

“It’s just a tweet. You make me sound like some kind of vigilante.”