CHAPTER FOUR: The Fourth Sub-Plan
1640 Words
"The Section 14-B application," he said. "The one you filed Monday."
Everything in me went still on the inside. On the outside: milk frother, next order, nothing visible.
"What about it?" I said.
"It was filed correctly," he said. "The protective status was confirmed this morning. The planning liaison notified the variance review board." He paused. "Parcel 8-A is now legally insulated from the boundary extension until the impact review completes."
I did not allow myself to react to the fact that he had looked this up. That he had tracked the outcome of an application filed by a barista he had met ten days ago, at a party in the rain, and had come here, today, to tell me it had worked.
"Good," I said. "Thank you for the information."
"Ms. Calloway." His voice had shifted — the professional register thinning again, the way it had in the Blackthorn corridor. "Why do you need that property protected?"
The café had the particular quality of being busy enough to provide cover — the ambient noise of a Friday mid-morning crowd insulating the counter from the tables — and his voice was low enough that this conversation existed in a private pocket inside the public space.
I turned fully to face him. I put my forearms on the counter, which brought our faces level in a way that was — I noted it and filed it — a posture I had never used with Damien Cole in five years of marriage. In my first life I had always, by some trained gravitational pull, arranged myself to be slightly smaller in his vicinity.
Not this time.
"Because it's my family's home," I said. "And someone has been systematically acquiring debt around it for three years. And the company doing the acquiring is not an unconnected party." I held his gaze. "I think you know that, Mr. Cole."
The silence was four seconds long and contained about fifteen conversations happening underneath it.
"What do you know about the company?" he said. Careful. Precise.
"Enough," I said. "What do you know?"
His jaw moved fractionally. Not quite a tell — Damien Cole was too controlled for tells — but an acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of a man who had been asked a question he already had an answer to and was deciding how much of it to share.
"Be careful," he said. "That's the second time I've said that to you. I don't repeat myself as a general rule."
"Then it must mean something," I said.
He looked at me for a moment that went slightly longer than either of us had planned. There was something in his expression — not warmth, not coldness, something in between that I didn't have an existing category for — and then the professional register came back down like a shutter, smooth and practised.
He picked up his cup.
"Enjoy the scholarship, Ms. Calloway," he said. "The spring semester is demanding. You'll want to arrive prepared."
And he walked out.
I watched him go. I watched the door close behind him. I watched through the window as he walked past on the pavement outside, and just before he cleared the frame, he half-turned — not back toward the window, just a fractional shift, as if something behind him had caught his attention — and then he kept walking.
"Next order," I said, and turned back to the machine.
My hands were steady. I was proud of them.
My chest was doing something that had absolutely no place in a sixty-day acquisition plan, and I acknowledged it, and I filed it under "not right now, Nova," and I made the next drink with the exact right milk temperature.
I was in trouble.
Not the dangerous kind. The other kind. The kind where you understand something about yourself that you'd rather not have to manage.
I had spent eight years knowing everything about Damien Cole and understanding none of it. In nine days of second life, standing at correct angles and asking questions he didn't expect and watching him come through a café door at twenty past eleven because I had a fifty-eight percent confidence estimate that he would — I was beginning to understand things I didn't have in my first life.
And understanding was, I was discovering, considerably more complicated than knowledge.
Focus, the Radio said.
"I know," I said, to the milk frother.
Petra passed again. She looked at me. She looked at the empty space by the door where he had been standing.
"Business plan thoughts?" she said.
"Something like that," I said.
She nodded with the philosophical acceptance of someone who had worked in a café long enough to understand that love and strategy often looked identical from the outside, and both of them made people say strange things to the equipment.
At three o'clock, Marcus texted: — The loan agreement is ready. The financial journalist I mentioned two weeks ago has responded. She wants to meet. Do you want me to set it up?
I read this between customers and typed back: Yes. But not until I know more about what she has. Can you find out what her angle is first?
— Already did. Her name is Simone Achike. She had a byline at the Crestholm Ledger for six years. Stopped publishing eight months ago. She's been investigating the Meridian Holdings corporate structure since the development announcement.
I put my phone in my apron pocket and felt the pieces of the board shifting.
Simone Achike. I hadn't heard this name in my first life. The investigation hadn't been public — hadn't broken before I died. Which meant in the first timeline, whatever she had found had either been buried or she had not been in the right position to use it.
In this timeline, I was going to make sure she was in exactly the right position.
I texted back: Set up the meeting. Somewhere public and low-profile. And Marcus — don't tell her who I am yet. Not the full picture.
His reply: — Meaning don't tell her you came back from the dead.
Correct.
— Reasonable. How do you want me to describe you?
I thought about this for approximately two seconds.
Someone with a specific interest in the Meridian Holdings ownership structure and the resources to find things that are difficult to find, I typed. That's accurate and it's enough.
— Also: "has a very good blazer and a color-coded folder system and will absolutely be the most prepared person in the room." Should I add that?
Don't make me revise my opinion of you.
— Too late. I'm your favourite person, admit it.
I pocketed the phone before I smiled at it, because Petra was watching.
At six o'clock, when the Friday evening rush had thinned to a comfortable scatter of harbour-view sitters and laptop workers, my phone rang.
Not Marcus. Not a number I knew.
I answered it with the specific alertness I had developed for unknown numbers in this second life, which was: assume it could be anything, prepare for it to be important.
"Ms. Calloway." The voice was female. Mid-thirties. The particular measured quality of someone who chose their words because they had learned what happened when you didn't. "My name is Simone Achike. I understand you're interested in the Meridian Holdings structure."
I looked at the clock. Marcus had set this up in three hours, which was either very efficient or Simone Achike had already been looking for me before he made contact.
"I am," I said. "How did you find my number?"
"A mutual contact," she said. "And before you ask — I verified through two independent channels that you're not connected to Cole Industries or any of the associated entities. That was necessary before I called."
"Thorough," I said.
"Necessary," she said. "Ms. Calloway, I have been building a case for eight months. I have documentation that is significant but not yet sufficient to publish. I believe you have something I don't." A pause. "I'd like to meet."
"Where?" I said.
"Somewhere with ambient noise, no cameras I don't know about, and access to a fast exit." Another pause. "I know that sounds paranoid."
"It sounds professional," I said. "The harbour fish market. Saturday morning. Seven AM. The oyster counter at the west end — the vendor there doesn't arrive until eight, so the counter will be empty."
A short silence.
"You've been to the market," she said.
"I know Crestholm well," I said.
"All right," she said. "Seven AM. Come alone."
"Same to you," I said.
She hung up without goodbye, which I found I respected.
I untied my apron. I looked out at the harbour going silver in the late-afternoon light.
Forty-seven days.
I was about to find out if Simone Achike knew what I thought she knew.
And if she did — if she had the documentation that I believed existed, the kind that put names to the chain of shell companies that reached from Eleanor Cole's trust all the way to my mother's front door — then the sixty-day plan was about to grow a fourth sub-plan, and the fourth sub-plan was the one that changed everything.
I picked up my bag. I walked out into the October evening.
Behind me, the café did what cafés did, which was stay warm and present and entirely indifferent to the fact that the things happening inside it were considerably more significant than they appeared.
Go home, the Radio said. Eat something. Tell your mother she has good instincts and you're glad she raised you with them. Sleep more than four hours.
"Working on it," I said.
The pigeon by the door looked at me.
"Not you," I told you. "You have no instincts worth complimenting."
It blinked. Deeply unbothered.
I walked home.
- Writer
