Everything after that had been real. He sat with that for three weeks. The text arrived on a Tuesday night in late January. He was home having dinner when his phone lit up on the counter. He almost didn't look at it until he'd finished eating.
Something made him reach for it. North Pine Cafe. Friday, 700 p.m. No security, no files, no plan. If you don't come, I'll understand.
That was all. No followup, no explanation, no second message. Hedging the first. Gavin set the phone face down on the counter. He ate the rest of his dinner, washed his bowl, stood at the kitchen sink for a while, looking out at the street below, dark and snowcovered and quiet.
He thought about the porch on Christmas night, the way she'd talked about someone at work who believed every right decision needed a casualty. I'm trying to disagree with him. And then she had in front of 14 people on the record with her position on the line. He thought about Lucy's drawing, the one Elise had kept. He'd seen it folded carefully in her coat pocket when she was leaving the house on Christmas morning.
She hadn't made a thing of it. She'd just kept it. He picked up his phone. He read the message again. Then he put it back down and went to bed.
Friday evening. North Pine Cafe was warm and quiet. A few tables occupied. soft music from somewhere in the back, the smell of cinnamon and coffee and something baking. Snow fell outside the window, the slow, drifting kind that Minneapolis produces in January, indifferent and beautiful and entirely unplanned. Elise arrived at 5 minutes to 7.
She asked for the window table. She sat with her coat folded in her lap. No security in the room, no earpiece, no phone on the table. She had told Grant she would not need anything until morning. She ordered a coffee.
She watched the door. At 2 minutes 7, Gavin came through it. He stopped when he saw her. Something moved through his face. Not surprise exactly, but the particular expression of a man who had talked himself into low expectations and is now quietly recalibrating.
Elise stood. She had thought she would be better at this moment. She had not expected the nerves, the specific highfrequency anxiety of someone who has spent her entire adult life knowing how rooms will end and is now standing in one where she genuinely doesn't. Gavin crossed the cafe. He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.