In the morning the bottle was on my desk.

Macallan twenty-five, two thousand dollars a bottle, the kind of gift that gets billed back to a client as an administrative cost so the man giving it never feels the price. The note was on firm stationery. The signature read J. Hale.

The handwriting did not.

Jordan wrote left-handed; his letters leaned back the way left-handed letters do, and we had laughed about it once at lunch when he'd dragged his cuff through wet ink. This hand leaned forward. The capital J carried a serif Jordan never used. Someone had signed his name for him, the way you sign a man's name when you want him to be standing in a room he was never in.

I didn't touch the note. I photographed it on my personal phone, killed the signal, and slid the phone into the locked drawer where I keep my mother's last letter and the lease I've stopped pretending I'll break. Then I sat down and looked at the bottle as though it might tell me whose hand had held the pen.

My phone buzzed. L.C.

Don't open it.

I stared at the screen. He couldn't see my office. The blinds were down. I typed before I could stop myself.

The bottle, or the question of why you're watching my office.

The reply took long enough that I pictured him deciding whether to spend the truth. The bottle. Leave it where it is. Let them see you haven't moved it.

And the watching?

I don't have to watch your office to know what arrives in it. A pause, the three dots living and dying twice. That should frighten you more than it does. It frightens me that it doesn't.

I read that last line four times. It was the closest thing to a crack I'd seen in him — it frightens me — and it landed lower in me than it had any right to, a warmth blooming in a body that should have been all alarm. Every instinct I had built over thirty-two years stood up at once and told me to put the phone down and run. I put the phone face-down on the desk. I did not run. That was the whole of the danger, right there: that the man setting off every alarm was the same man I wanted to text back.

I didn't text back.

For a long minute I sat with the bottle and the dead phone and the Rothko-dark feeling that the room itself was a held breath. Through the glass wall I could see three partners pass in the corridor, none of them looking in, all of them somehow aware of me — the firm had a way of watching you by the careful arrangement of who didn't turn their head. My mother had worked in buildings like this one her whole life and taught me the rule before I could spell it: the ones who never look, mija, are the ones who already know where you are. I had spent ten years learning to be the woman no one looked at. Now two men had looked at once, from opposite floors, and I couldn't tell which gaze was the trap and which was the hand.

The terrible part — the part I'd have died before saying aloud — was that I wanted the dangerous one to keep looking. I picked the phone back up, set it back down, picked it up. It frightens me that it doesn't, he'd written. I had built my whole life on never being moved by a man in an expensive coat, and he'd cracked it in three sentences and a quarter-turn of a cuff. The wanting and the alarm were the same heat in the same place, and I could not get a knife between them.

So I did the only steady thing left. I stood up, smoothed the jacket I'd bought because L.C. had told me to wear black, and went to find the one person in the building who might tell me the truth without first deciding what I'd survive.

---

I went to Jordan's office instead.

It was three doors down, and the blinds were half-drawn, which they hadn't been on any of the seven mornings I'd walked past. I knocked once. He opened and let me in without a word and closed the door behind me with the care of a man who'd practiced exactly how loud the latch should be.

He looked like he hadn't slept. More than that — like he hadn't planned to.

"Did you send me the bottle," I said.

"No."

"The note signed with your name."

"No."

"Was it meant for me, or for whoever else might walk in and read it."

He turned to the window, the one that faced the air shaft and so faced nothing that could face back. When he turned around again he looked at me the way Lachlan had looked at me yesterday and the exact opposite of it — Lachlan had studied what I would survive; Jordan was measuring what he would.

"Reyes. I can't tell you what I think. I can't tell you what I've been told. My bar license can't survive me saying the things I'd say to you if I could. Do you understand the difference between can't and won't."

"Yes."

"Good." He sat. He set his elbows on the desk and folded his hands, and the hands shook, very slightly, and when he caught me seeing it he unfolded them and laid them flat — the gesture of a man putting his own tremor away in a drawer. "But there's a thing I can do. I can give you something that doesn't legally belong to me. The way an executor hands you a sealed envelope with a date of death on the front. I don't have to know what's inside. I don't have to swear to it. I only have to deliver it on the day the delivery comes due."

"And the day it comes due."

"Is today."

He opened the top drawer. Inside was a small flat object the color of wet asphalt — a USB drive, the cheap kind sold in three-packs, unmarked but for a serial number scratched into the underside.

He didn't slide it across. He set it on the wood between us, where I would have to be the one to reach for it. Where, if anyone ever asked, I would be the one who'd picked it up.

I looked at it and felt the floor of my life tilt a few degrees further from the place I'd built it.

"Jordan. What is it."

"It's encrypted. The password is the date my sister was born. You'll know it." He said it without telling me the date, without ever having told me he had a sister, and the strange certainty settled over me that he was right — that I would know it, the way you know a thing that has been arranged for you to know.

"Jordan. I don't have your sister's birthday. I don't have your sister."

"No," he agreed. "But the person who built that drive thought you might need a password you'd never have to write down and never forget. So they didn't use mine." He looked at me, and something moved behind his eyes that I'd later understand was pity. "Try a date that belongs to you. Try the one you'd reach for at three in the morning if your life depended on getting it right and you only had one guess. That's the kind of password it is."

I didn't answer that. I couldn't, yet. But a cold thread of understanding was already pulling tight in me — that whoever had made this drive knew which date I'd reach for in the dark, which meant they knew me the way only one other person in this building had proven they knew me, and I did not want to follow that thread to where it led.

My phone buzzed against my hip. I didn't look. I knew without looking it was L.C., and I knew the not-looking was the only loyal thing I'd done all morning, and I wasn't sure to whom.

"If I take this," I said, "what does it cost."

"Everything you've built. Maybe." Jordan smiled, and it was the smile of a man who had spent a long time deciding how to smile in the moment he handed someone the thing that might get them both killed. "But you were never going to keep it clean, Reyes. They don't pick the ones who'll stay clean. They pick the ones who'll notice — and then they spend the rest of their lives deciding whether to let you."

Outside the door, footsteps passed and faded. We both went still until they were gone. Then he leaned in, and his voice dropped to almost nothing.

"His brother's in Hoboken," he said. "If you ever need a key, a door, a floor to sleep on that isn't watched — the number's written inside the foil at the neck of that Macallan. Don't read it in this building. Don't read it anywhere with a window."

"Whose brother."

"Mine." He held my eyes. "I'm telling you in case there comes a day you can't ask me."

The phone buzzed a second time. This time I turned it over. L.C. — Whatever he's giving you, don't open it on any device that's touched this building's network. Not even once.

I looked up from the screen to Jordan's face and felt the two men close on me from opposite sides — one in the room with shaking hands and a sister he'd never mentioned, one a floor above me who somehow knew, in real time, what was being put into my hands. Trust and danger had stopped being two directions. They'd become the same direction, and I was already walking it.

"Reyes." Jordan stood. "Get out of my office. Take the long way — the blinds in the south corridor are down for repairs that aren't happening. Use them while they're useful. And one more thing." He waited until I'd risen. "The partner who looked at you yesterday. Whatever he's told you, however right it sounds — right is how they get the careful ones. The women on that drive were all careful. Every single one. It didn't save a one of them." He let that sit. "I'm not saying don't trust him. I'm saying you won't be able to tell, and neither could they."

I stood too. The USB sat on the desk between us, asphalt-grey, waiting for the one motion that would make it mine.

"Jordan." I lowered my voice the way my mother lowered hers when she was about to say a thing she couldn't afford to repeat. "If I take this. And then something happens. To me, or to you."

He looked at the drive, and then at me, and the smile was gone now, and what was under it was worse than fear — it was the steadiness of a man who'd already done the math and didn't like the answer.

"If I disappear," he said, "this isn't a coincidence." He pushed the drive the last inch across the wood, until it touched the edge of my hand. "And if you disappear, Reyes — neither is that."

I closed my fingers around it.