THE PRICE OF A BREATH

Chapter 12 — Looking Him Up

She spent her first free hour after the shift doing to Adrian Cole exactly what he'd done to her, which was not lost on her even as she did it.

Continental Mutual's website gave her almost nothing — a stock photo of a glass office building, a mission statement about "protecting what matters," a claims department listed by region rather than by name. She found him properly on the third page of a search, in a regional business journal from four years back, a short profile on "the investigators insurers actually want." Adrian Cole was quoted twice. Once about a case where he'd spent six weeks proving a supposedly accidental house fire really had been accidental, over the loud objections of a claims manager who wanted it flagged as arson to avoid paying out. Once about a case where he'd done the opposite — kept pulling a thread on a drowning that everyone else wanted closed quietly, until it turned out not to be an accident at all.

*I don't have a side,* he'd told the reporter. *I have a policy and a set of facts. Most of the time those two things agree with each other faster than people expect.*

It was, she thought, an uncomfortably reasonable way to describe himself. She'd been braced for arrogance, or hunger, or the particular flavor of self-importance she associated with men who carried laminated badges. What she found instead looked a great deal like competence with no particular appetite attached to it, which was somehow worse, because competence without appetite didn't get bored and go home.

There was one more line in the article, buried near the end, that she read three times before she let herself close the tab. A colleague, quoted anonymously, describing him as "the guy you send when you actually want to know the truth, not just a number you can live with." She wasn't sure why that particular sentence bothered her more than anything he'd said to her in person. Maybe because it meant the version of him standing in her parking lot hadn't been a performance at all. It had simply been him, doing the thing he was known for doing.

She closed the laptop before she could read anything else that made him more human.

*

Mateo noticed the new tension before she'd said a word about it, which she supposed was the price of ten years of friendship — he'd developed an instrument for her moods more sensitive than anything she carried at work.

"You've got the face," he said, over noodles neither of them had ordered enough of. "The one from a few weeks ago. Worse, actually."

"There's a man asking questions about the case I told you about. The old one. The unresolved thing with the maintenance worker."

"What kind of questions?"

"Insurance questions. Reasonable ones." She turned her chopsticks over, not eating. "He's good at his job, Mateo. That's the whole problem. If he were bad at it, I wouldn't be thinking about this at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday instead of asking you about your landlord."

"You want me to be worried, or you want me to tell you it's fine?"

"I don't actually know," she admitted, and something in saying it out loud made her feel lighter and worse in exactly equal measure. "I think I want you to notice that I still came tonight. That I'm still trying."

"I noticed." He said it simply, without making a production of it, which was its own kind of gift. "For what it's worth — you've never been someone who panics over a competent person doing their job. If this guy's got you like this, it's because some part of you already knows he's going to find something. I'm not going to ask what. I trust you'll tell me the day you're allowed to."

She didn't correct the word *allowed*, though she noticed he'd chosen it instead of *ready*, and understood that her oldest friend had quietly built himself a theory about her life that was gentler than the truth and probably going to hold up for exactly as long as he let it.

"You could ask," she said, quieter than she meant to. "I wouldn't blame you for asking."

"I know I could." He pushed the last of his noodles around the container without eating them, the closest thing to nervousness she'd seen from him in years. "I've decided I'd rather have a friend who owes me an explanation someday than a friend I badgered into giving me one before she was ready. Call it selfish. I like winning the long game."

It was, she thought later, driving home, one of the kindest things anyone had said to her in ten weeks, and she hated slightly that it had come wrapped in a joke, because it meant she didn't have to decide, right then, whether she deserved it.

*

She gave Elias the name before she'd even taken her coat off, and watched him write it down rather than nod like a man confirming something he already knew.

"Adrian Cole," he repeated, setting the pen down. "I'll admit I'd rather he existed than not — an ordinary competent investigator circling this from the outside was always going to happen eventually. Better now, while I can still learn something about him, than later, once he's already decided what kind of story he's telling himself."

"You make it sound like you've done this before."

"Not with him specifically. With his type." He didn't reach for any folder this time — just leaned back in his chair. "People from outside these hospitals have looked into cases like this before. Not often, but it happens. Most of them land on some ordinary explanation eventually and move on satisfied. Others just lose interest, or get reassigned, or the case in front of them gets easier to close than the one underneath it. I couldn't give you a number if you asked me. I've never kept one."

"Has anyone ever not stopped?"

"I genuinely don't know. Either the case resolved before I found out, or I simply lost track of the person, which happens more often than I'd like to admit." He spread his hands slightly, an honest, almost apologetic gesture. "Cole isn't on any list, because I don't keep one, and I haven't studied him long enough to know what kind of investigator he'll turn out to be. I'd like to find that out before he decides for both of us."

"You're saying you want to study him."

"I'm saying I'd like to understand what kind of investigator he is before he understands what kind of case this is. Those aren't quite the same ambition, but they overlap enough to be useful." He set the pen down again. "What do you want to do?"

She considered lying, out of habit, the way she'd nearly done with Mateo, and then didn't, the way she was slowly getting better at not doing with either of them.

"I want to call him," she said. "Before he calls me again. I'd rather choose when this conversation happens than keep being ambushed in a parking lot."

Elias studied her for a moment with something that might have been approval, or might simply have been the look he gave anyone who'd finally arrived at a conclusion he'd been waiting on. "That's a reasonable instinct. I'd only caution you about one thing."

"What."

"Don't call him to manage him. Call him because you've decided that's genuinely what you want to do next. He strikes me, from what you've described, as someone who can tell the difference between a person answering honestly and a person performing honesty for an audience. Most competent investigators can. It's usually the only advantage they have over everyone lying to them."

*

She called Adrian from her own kitchen that night, the card he'd given her propped against a coffee mug she hadn't washed in two days, and he picked up on the second ring like he'd been half expecting it.

"Ms. Vale."

"I'd rather talk to you on my own schedule than yours," she said. "So I'm calling."

There was something that might have been a laugh on the other end, small and entirely without mockery in it. "That's fair. Most people wait for me to call twice."

"I'm not most people."

"No," Adrian said, and she could hear, even over the phone, that he meant it as an observation rather than a compliment. "I'd noticed that already. It's most of why I gave you the card instead of just filing my report and moving on to the next claim."

She sat with the coffee mug and the dead phone number and the notary's name all within arm's reach, three small facts from a case Adrian didn't yet know existed, and understood, listening to him wait patiently on the other end of the line for her to decide what she actually wanted to say, that she had just chosen, deliberately, to walk toward the one part of this whole strange new life she still might have been able to walk away from.

"I don't have an explanation for you," she said. "But I'm willing to talk about what I don't have one for, if you're willing to listen without writing me up as a suspect the second I say something you don't expect."

"I can work with that," Adrian said. "Tomorrow. Somewhere that isn't a parking lot."

"Somewhere that isn't a parking lot," she agreed, and hung up before either of them could turn the moment into something more dramatic than it needed to be.