Chapter 6: The First Time
The meeting took three days to arrange.
Three days of secure locations, rerouted cars, two false departures from the medical suite designed to draw surveillance away from the real one, and a conversation between Adrian and Sarah conducted entirely through Vincent's secure line that lasted forty-seven minutes and covered, in order: the immediate threat, Thomas Carver, Marco Reyes, the surgery timeline, and then, finally, after a long silence on both ends of the line, the thing neither of them had said directly in three years.
"She's going to have questions," Sarah said.
"When she's older.
About why."
"I know."
"I don't have good answers for her yet."
"Neither do I," Adrian said.
"But I'd rather be there to look for them with her than leave her with a blank space."
Another silence.
"She asked me this morning," Sarah said, "if her daddy was tall."
Adrian didn't speak for a moment.
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her yes."
"That's — yes.
That's accurate."
"I know it's accurate, Adrian.
I was there." A pause, and something in Sarah's voice shifted — not quite a laugh, but the shape of one.
The first one in a long time.
"She also asked if he was nice."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I thought he was trying to be."
The meeting happened on a Thursday afternoon, in a safe house on the outer edge of the city — a small house with a yard, chosen because it had a yard, because Vincent had thought of that detail without being asked.
Adrian arrived first.
He sat in the living room in a chair near the window and did not look at his phone and did not count the ceiling tiles because there were no ceiling tiles, only a low white ceiling, and he had nothing to count except the seconds.
He heard the car in the driveway.
He heard the front door.
He heard small footsteps in the hallway, and then Sarah's voice, low and careful: "Remember what I told you, sweetheart.
Take your time."
The footsteps stopped in the doorway.
Adrian turned.
Lily Moretti was three years old and she had his eyes — dark, direct, taking in everything at once — and she was holding Mr.
Buttons by one ear and looking at him with the grave, total attention that small children give to things they have been thinking about for a very long time.
She didn't run to him.
She didn't cry.
She studied him the way she studied her drawings before she decided what to add next.
Then she said: "You don't have a face in my pictures."
Adrian's throat closed.
"I know," he said.
"I'm sorry about that."
"I didn't know what you looked like."
"I know.
That was my fault."
She considered this.
Then she crossed the room, climbed up onto the couch beside his chair with the focused effort of someone whose legs were not quite long enough yet, settled herself, and held Mr.
Buttons out toward him.
"This is Mr.
Buttons," she said.
Adrian looked at the bear.
The original, worn soft from three years of use, one button eye slightly loose.
Not the replacement sitting in his safe.
The real one.
"I know Mr.
Buttons," he said carefully.
"He's very important."
Lily looked at him sharply.
"How do you know that?"
A beat.
"Your mother told me."
She accepted this.
She pulled Mr.
Buttons back and held him in her lap and looked at Adrian for another long moment.
"Are you staying?" she asked.
The word landed in the center of his chest and did not leave.
"I'm going to try very hard to stay," he said.
"I promise."
She nodded, apparently satisfied, and leaned slightly sideways until her small shoulder was resting against the arm of his chair.
Sarah stood in the doorway.
She didn't come in.
She pressed one hand flat against the doorframe and watched her daughter lean against the father she'd drawn without a face for three years, and she didn't say anything at all.
She didn't need to.
But in the driveway outside, one of Vincent's men was on his phone.
His voice was low and urgent.
And when Vincent stepped outside to take the call, his expression, when he came back in, was not the expression of a man who had just watched something good happen.
May you like
"We have a problem," he said quietly, to no one in particular.
"Carver isn't working alone."
