He came, as he said he would.
Twenty-three minutes after I hung up the phone, Lucien's car appeared at the end of the block and he got out before it had fully stopped and walked toward me with that particular quality of his, the one that looked like calm from a distance and felt, up close, like controlled urgency. He stopped in front of me on the pavement, read my face the way he always read my face, fast and complete, and then he put his hand on my shoulder, just once, brief and grounding, and said: "Come."
We went back to the penthouse. He made me tea, which surprised me because I had never seen him make anything that wasn't coffee, and he did it badly, the water slightly too hot and the bag left in too long, and I drank it anyway because the effort of it was more useful than getting i
