Chapter 19: Daniel Marsh
The café was called Linden’s.
It sat at the south edge of Atherton on a corner that didn’t get much foot traffic after seven — the kind of place that survived on regulars and the particular loyalty of people who had been coming long enough that the staff knew their order before they sat down. Warm light through the windows, four tables occupied, soft music that wasn’t trying to be noticed. The kind of place chosen specifically because nothing dramatic was supposed to happen in it.
We arrived eight minutes early.
Daniel Marsh was already there.
He was somewhere in his mid fifties — lean, careful, the kind of man who had spent thirty years in rooms where the wrong word at the wrong moment had consequences and had developed, in response, the specific economy of s
