Page 124 of Unlocked

"Oui." His expression shifted into something more careful. "The vote on the new head."

"Fisher," Tatum said.

"That is the expectation," Armand said. "He has positioned himself very effectively. Too effectively, perhaps, which itself tells you something about how long he has been planning." He paused. "I will be voting against."

"As will I," Tatum said. “Stuart has already told me that I need to vote for Fisher. ‘He is a friend to us,’ is how he put it. That alone is enough to make me vote against.”

They looked at each other across the table. Life moved around them in the restaurant, other conversations, other tables, the ordinary noise of an evening in the city that had no idea what was happening in this corner of it.

"Armand," she said. She stopped.

She had not said his name in that particular way for two months. Avoiding the words that came after it. She had gotten very good at navigating around the shape of him in conversation, the way you learned to navigate around furniture you'd removed from a room, the muscle memory of absence everywhere she turned.

"Je sais," Armand said quietly. I know. "You do not have to say it."

"I can't," she said. "I'm sorry. I just can't."

He said, "You do not have to say anything at all."

She looked at the table, pressed her lips together, and breathed carefully through the wave of it, the grief always just below the surface, that she had gotten better at hiding and managing in the same way you got better at managing chronic pain, not gone, just incorporated, just part of the landscape of every day now.

She had loved him. She still loved him. She suspected she was going to love him for a very long time in the way you loved things that had fundamentally altered you, not comfortably or easily but completely, all the way through.

Davis had been murdered by a drug addict during a late-night stroll in Riverside Park. That was what everyone believed. The Society had handled everything with the thoroughness it applied to all inconvenient events, quietly and completely, and without leaving anything that pointed anywhere useful. The story had held. It would continue to hold.

Archer had just ceased to exist. That had been expected because of what happened, so no one raised an eyebrow at it. He had been there one minute, and then he had evaporated as if he’d never been anything more than mist.

She knew better, and she would continue to know better. And she would do nothing with that knowledge because there was nothing to do with it but bear the pain.

"He told me he was coming back," she said. She directed her words to the table rather than to Armand. "I heard him. He said he was coming back."

Armand was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "He meant it. Whatever else you may wonder about, do not wonder about that. He meant every word."

"I believed him," she said. "Which was stupid."

"Non." Armand's voice was firm but gentle. "It was not stupid. It was the truth as he knew it in that moment, and Archer did not say things he did not mean. You know this."

She looked up at him. His eyes were steady and sad and entirely without the false comfort that most people felt compelled to offer. She was grateful for that more than she could say.

"He loved you," Armand said. "I want you to know this, from me, because I saw it and I told him I saw it. He did not argue with me, which for Archer was the same as confirming it." The ghost of something moved across his face. "A man like that, who has been alone for so long, does not become different around someone by accident. He was different around you from the beginning. I noticed it. I said nothing for a while, but I noticed." He paused. "He loved you, Tatum. Whatever happened, that was true, and it remains true. Nothing can change it."

She didn't answer. She couldn't.

The toast arrived. She ate it without tasting it because Armand had ordered it, and Armand was looking at her, and it was the easiest way to do something with her hands.

After a while, Armand said, "What will you do now, hm? Have you thought about this?"

She looked at the wall of the restaurant. "I don't know."

"The money from Lebowitz's investors will be returned," he said. "That is done. Your work on this case… It is complete." He looked at her steadily. "You have nothing left here that requires you to stay, non?"

She thought about the apartment. The secret room. The wall of research that had consumed so much of her life and in some ways saved it, and in other ways cost her more than she'd known she had to spend.

She thought about Florence. About Ireland. About a chart someone had done for her once that said the stars were better for her somewhere that wasn't here.

"My parents," she said.

Armand nodded slowly. "Leave that to me," he said.