Page 88 of His Wall

I had stood across the lobby of my own building days ago and watched him put his hand on the side of her face on the sidewalk through the glass.

He came in. He dropped a duffel bag inside the door. He did not look at her first. He looked at the apartment — the layout, the windows, the kitchen, the bedroom door, and the couch. The whole thing in two seconds. Then his eyes came to her.

"Cal."

"Rafael."

He looked at me.

He crossed the apartment. He extended his hand.

"Mr. Cross. Rafael Torres."

I stood up. I shook his hand. His grip was firm. His left hand stayed at his side.

"Julian."

He nodded once. His eyes moved past me, past my shoulder, and to the bedroom door behind me.

The bed was unmade. Her boots were beside my shoes on the floor. There were two glasses of water on the nightstand.

His face did not change.

He had seen it.

"Let me brief you both."

He sat at the small table by the front window. He pulled a folder out of the duffel and laid it open in front of him. Leah pulled out the chair across from him and sat. I took the third chair, beside her.

Torres opened the file.

"Conrad's network. The Bureau's moved on three fronts since yesterday afternoon. Shell companies frozen pending review — eleven entities across four jurisdictions, all of them pulled out of the photographs Calder sent. Accounts flagged at six correspondent banks. The judge is under preliminary investigation through the OIG, quietly, until we have enough for a public referral. The forensic team has the bullet from the garage. The lab pulled rifling marks consistent with a Russian-manufactured suppressed rifle, model SVU. We're running the procurement chain."

Leah's voice changed when she answered him.

It was the voice from the garage. Operational. Acronyms I half-knew. Case references I did not know at all. "That's consistent with the Markelov network out of Brighton, isn't it? The procurement chain through that channel ran the Petrov case in '21. Has financial done a full sweep of the secondary couriers?"

Torres answered in the same vocabulary.

They had a rhythm. They finished each other's sentences. He referred to a case from four years ago by a single name and she nodded once.

I sat beside her.

I did not say anything.

I watched the woman I had been sleeping with for two days become fluent in a world I did not belong to. I watched her shoulder lean toward Torres an inch when she leaned forward to look at the page in front of him. I watched him point at a paragraph with his right index finger, and her dark hair brushed against his sleeve.

I did not compete with words. I had never been the man at a table with the most words.

I competed with presence.

When she sat down, I sat beside her. My hand went to her knee under the table. She did not move her knee away. When she got up to make coffee in the galley kitchen at the back of the apartment, I followed. I took the mug out of her hand at the counter.

"I'll do it."

"Julian — "

"I'll do it."