THE PRICE OF A BREATH

Chapter 6 — The Version She Gives Him

Mateo had picked the restaurant they'd gone to for every birthday since they were nineteen, which meant he was either making a point or hadn't thought about it at all, and knowing him, it was probably both.

"You look like a woman who's about to cancel," he said, before she'd even sat down.

"I'm here, aren't I."

"You're here. You've also checked your phone four times since you walked in, and it's been thirty seconds."

She put the phone face-down on the table, which felt like more of a concession than it should have. The restaurant hadn't changed — the same water-stained menus, the same waiter who'd been there since they were teenagers pretending to be old enough for the wine list. It was the kind of place that made her feel, briefly, like a person whose biggest problem was choosing between the lasagna and whatever the special was.

"So," Mateo said, once they'd ordered, once the bread had come and gone, once he'd run out of easy things to fill the silence with. "Are you going to tell me, or are we doing the thing where I guess and you say 'it's complicated' until I give up?"

"There's not much to tell."

"Fara." Just her name, the way he always said it when he wanted her to know he wasn't going to be talked out of the conversation. "You disappear for two weeks. You come back looking like you haven't slept since the last time I saw you. You've said the word 'work' more times tonight than most people say it in a month, and every time, it sounds like a door closing."

She turned her water glass a quarter turn, buying herself a second she didn't really need. "There was a patient. A bad case, the kind that doesn't leave you when your shift ends. And then some stuff around it got complicated in a way I wasn't expecting."

"Complicated how?"

"I've been helping someone look into an old situation connected to it. An old wrong that never got fixed. It's taking up more of my head than I want it to."

It wasn't a lie. She'd gotten good, these last two weeks, at building sentences that were entirely true and still managed to say almost nothing.

"Is it dangerous?" he asked, and something in his voice had gone quieter, more serious than the question probably warranted on its own.

"I don't think so." Which also wasn't a lie, exactly, even though the file thirteen days early sat in the back of her mind like a splinter she kept forgetting to worry about until she moved wrong. "Mostly it's just sad. It's about a man who died without anyone ever telling him he was forgiven for something."

Mateo was quiet for a moment, turning his own glass the way she'd turned hers, a habit she'd never noticed they shared until just now.

"Can I say something, and you not get weird about it?"

"When has that ever stopped you?"

"You've always done this. Since we were kids. You find someone else's unfixable problem and you climb all the way inside it, like if you just work hard enough at somebody else's mess, it'll count for something." He said it gently, not like an accusation, more like a man setting down something he'd been carrying around for a while and finally found the right table for. "I just don't want you disappearing into this one the way you disappeared into the last one."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure you do." He didn't push it further than that, which she was grateful for, because she genuinely didn't have an answer ready.

He let the silence sit for a second, then softened it with the kind of shrug he'd been giving her since they were fourteen, the one that meant *fine, your turn's over, mine now.* Instead, he told her about his own week — a promotion he wasn't sure he wanted, because it came with a title and a pay bump and absolutely no guarantee he'd still like the job in six months; a landlord threatening to sell the building he'd lived in for six years, which meant apartment-hunting in a market that seemed personally offended by his budget; his sister's new boyfriend, a very earnest man who kept bringing homemade kombucha to family dinners and whom Mateo was trying, with visible effort, to like. Ordinary things. She listened properly this time, made herself ask follow-up questions, made herself be a person having dinner with her friend instead of a woman running two conversations at once.

"You'd tell me," he said, toward the end, not quite a question, "if it ever stopped being something you could handle on your own."

"I'd tell you," she said, and hoped, more than believed, that it was true.

"I'm sorry," she said, later, over the check neither of them had let the other pay for outright, splitting the difference the way they'd done since they were broke twenty-year-olds. "For being a ghost."

"You're forgiven," Mateo said. "Also, I'm keeping score, and you owe me one weekend where you turn your phone off entirely."

"Deal," she said, and meant it, and knew, even as she said it, that it was a promise she wasn't currently equipped to keep.

*

She called Elias from the parking lot, mostly because she didn't trust herself to sit with the day's second conversation until she'd handed some of it to someone who might actually know what to do with it.

"Daniel remembers someone else asking about Marcel," she said, without preamble, once he'd picked up. "Before his heart stopped. Weeks before. A woman, on the phone. He doesn't remember much else — no name, nothing you could trace. Just that she was asking about Marcel specifically, and that it felt off to him even at the time."

There was a pause on the line long enough that she checked to see if the call had dropped.

"That's earlier than the file," Elias said finally.

"I know."

"Which means whoever this is didn't start with a dead man's paperwork. They started with a living one." His voice had lost some of its usual composure, not dramatically, just enough that she noticed. "That's a different kind of attention than I was expecting anyone to be paying."

"Different how?"

"The file could be explained by curiosity after the fact — someone noticing an anomaly once it had already happened and going back to understand it. A phone call to Daniel, weeks before he ever went near that pool, isn't curiosity after the fact. It looks like anticipation. Someone was paying attention to him before anything happened. I don't know why."

"Or someone believed something might happen to a lot of people, and Daniel was one name on a longer list."

"That," Elias said, "is the version I'd prefer to be true. I don't yet have a reason to think it is."

"You still don't know who it is."

"No," he said. "I don't. And I'd like to be clear that I don't enjoy telling you that twice in one week."

"Should I be doing something differently? Being careful in some specific way?"

"I don't know that yet either. But I'd ask you not to go looking for this woman on your own. Not because I think you can't handle yourself. Because I've seen what happens when people go looking for answers to this before they understand what they're holding." He didn't elaborate, and something in the way he didn't made it clear he wasn't going to, not tonight.

"You keep doing that. Almost telling me something, and then deciding not to."

"I'm aware," Elias said. "It isn't kindness, if that's what it looks like. I simply don't think half of a warning does anyone much good, and I don't yet have the other half to give you."

"That's not comforting, Elias."

"No," he agreed. "It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be honest, which is the only thing I've got a reliable supply of at the moment."

She sat in the car a while after they'd hung up, engine off, the restaurant's sign flickering pink and blue in the side mirror, turning over the two conversations she'd had that night like coins in a pocket — one where she'd given someone she loved a version of the truth small enough to fit in a sentence, and one where a man who knew more than anyone alive had just admitted, in his own careful way, that he was afraid too.

She still didn't know which conversation had left her more unsettled. She only knew that when she finally drove home, she checked her rearview mirror three times before pulling out of the lot, then caught herself doing it and almost laughed.