THE PRICE OF A BREATH

Chapter 8 — Nothing at That Address

Daniel called her back two days after she asked, sounding apologetic before he'd said anything worth apologizing for.

"I checked with the carrier," he said. "Took some convincing — apparently asking about a call from a month ago makes you sound like you're building a case against your own phone company. But I got a number."

"And?"

"Landline. Disconnected now, but they could tell me it was registered to an address downtown. I wrote it down for you." He read it out, slow enough that she didn't have to ask him to repeat it, and she wrote it on the back of a grocery receipt because it was the only paper in her bag. "How's rehab going, by the way. I realize I called you about a phone number instead of asking that first."

"You're allowed one thing at a time," she said. "It's going fine. Keep walking."

"Find her," he said, before he hung up, in a voice that had stopped sounding like a grateful patient and started sounding like a man with his own reasons now. "I'd like to know who spent money finding out I existed before I almost stopped existing."

*

The address turned out to be a print shop that had closed, by the look of the dust on the windows, at least two years earlier. A faded sign still hung crooked above the door — *COPY & PRESS, SINCE 1994* — and a strip of yellowed tape sealed a flyer for a going-out-of-business sale that had apparently never found any takers. The phone line the woman had called Daniel from had belonged, at some point, to a business that no longer had a phone to answer it, in a storefront nobody had bothered to re-lease.

Fara stood on the sidewalk a while, hands in her pockets, doing the kind of math that didn't add up no matter which way she turned it. A disconnected line, at a defunct business, registered to nobody who could have picked up a phone from it in years. Either the number had been recycled through some administrative accident nobody had caught — which happened, she knew, more often than people liked to think — or someone had gone out of their way to make a call that couldn't be traced back to an actual person.

She took a photo of the sign and sent it to Elias with no message attached, because she'd stopped being able to explain these things in full sentences days ago.

He called within the hour. "A dead line," he said, without preamble. "That's new information, even if it isn't useful information yet."

"New how?"

"It could mean whoever called Daniel wanted the call to be hard to trace," Elias said. "It could also mean nothing at all — old numbers get recycled, businesses close, records go stale for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone's intentions." He paused, long enough that she could hear him moving papers somewhere on his end. "I don't like how easily the first explanation came to me, though."

"You keep telling me you don't like things. You never tell me what to do about them."

"Because I don't know what to do about them," Elias said, plainly, and there was something almost relieving in how little effort he put into softening it this time. "I'll ask around. Quietly. That's the only thing I know how to do with a dead end — treat it like a live one until it proves otherwise."

*

Naomi caught her before her shift the next evening, in the stairwell instead of the hallway, which was how Fara knew before a word was said that this conversation wasn't going to be like the others.

"Administration wants a presentation," Naomi said. "Quality review. They've seen the numbers I've been pulling — recovery rates, this quarter versus the last four. I have to explain them."

Fara felt her stomach drop somewhere below the stairs. "Explain them how?"

"That's the problem. I have a statistically significant anomaly, and the timing is hard to ignore. It became noticeable around the same time as what happened with you and the drowning victim." Naomi's voice stayed level, doctor-flat, the tone she probably used to deliver diagnoses she didn't like either. "I haven't put your name in the report. I want you to know that. I don't know what I'd even accuse you of."

"But."

"But I can't keep leaving it out forever and still call it a report. Sooner or later somebody smarter than me is going to pull the same numbers and ask the same question, and they won't have spent the last month deciding they trust you." She rubbed at her eyes, the gesture of someone who'd already lost sleep over a decision she hadn't fully made yet. "I keep telling myself there's a medical explanation. Some protocol variance, some equipment recalibration nobody logged. I've run out of those explanations, Fara. I'm not asking as your friend right now. I'm asking as the person whose name is going to be on this report."

Fara leaned against the cold stairwell rail, the fluorescent light overhead doing nothing kind for either of their faces. "What do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything," Naomi said. "I want you to understand that I'm buying you time, not covering for you. Those aren't the same thing, and I don't know how much time I've got left to sell."

She went on down the stairs before Fara could answer, her footsteps fading into the ordinary noise of a hospital that had no idea how many quiet decisions were currently being made to keep it that way.

*

Fara didn't go home. She sat in her car outside the closed print shop again, past midnight, the grocery receipt with its dead address still folded in her coat pocket, and thought about how strange it was that the two most dangerous things in her life right now were a woman she'd never met and a friend who was trying, in her own careful way, to protect her.

At sixteen, the danger had been the water, and the only thing standing between her brother and the rest of his life had been thirty seconds she hadn't used fast enough. Now the danger didn't have a shape she could dive toward. It had a disconnected phone line, and a colleague running out of ways to explain her away, and no version of fast enough that would fix either one.

She sat there long enough that the streetlight above her flickered twice and steadied. Long enough to notice something small: the mail slot in the print shop's door wasn't stuffed with the usual drift of takeout menus and grocery flyers that collected on every other dead storefront on the block. Someone had cleared it, and not that long ago.

The dry cleaner two doors down was locking up for the night. She crossed over, mostly on instinct, and asked him if he knew who owned the place.

"Someone still comes by, now and then," he said, not looking up from his keys. "Couldn't tell you who."

"How do you know that?"

"Caught somebody letting themselves in once, months back. Didn't stop to introduce himself, and I didn't ask." He shrugged, already turning toward his car. "It's not exactly the neighborhood's biggest mystery. People hang onto dead businesses for tax reasons all the time."

He was probably right. That was the frustrating part — there was nothing here she could point to and call proof of anything. Just a door somebody still had a key to, and a mail slot somebody still bothered to empty.

The place looked abandoned. It apparently wasn't, not completely — and she didn't yet know what to do with a contradiction that small.

Eventually she drove home anyway, because a body only runs on adrenaline for so long before it starts billing you for it, and because whatever came next would still be there in the morning, whether or not she'd solved it by then.