Julian

The contract was in the safe.

I retrieved it at ten forty-seven, after the car had arrived back at the penthouse and Lena had said goodnight with the particular quiet of someone who had been managing something carefully for several hours and was now, finally, alone enough to stop managing it. I'd watched her walk down the hall. Watched her door close. Stood in the entrance hall for a moment in my coat with the evening still on me, Bridget's dining room and its careful warmth and the three women with their witness-eyes and the dessert fork, and then I'd gone to the study and opened the safe.

The...