Reject Me Once,Alpha.

What London Means

Chapter Seven: What London Means

I call the storage facility from the bathroom.

Not because I think the room is wired, though I have not ruled that out. Because I need four walls at close range and a door between me and the rest of the situation while I do something that cannot be undone once I do it.

The number is one I have not dialed in six years but still know the way you know things that were important during a period of your life that shaped you. Some information bypasses the part of the brain that forgets.

It rings four times.

“Hartley and Sons Storage, London Bridge location.”

“I need to check the status of a unit,” I say. “Account name Calloway. C-A-L-L-O-W-A-Y.”

The name my mother used before she married my father. The name he had chosen because it was the one thing he owned that had no traceable connection to him through any record that mattered.

He had taught me that once. About names. About the ones you keep and the ones you use and the ones you bury so deep that even you forget they are there until you need them.

Keys, he had called them. You never know which door you will need to open.

I had been seventeen. I had thought he was being dramatic.

Keyboard sounds on the other end of the line. A pause.

“I am showing a unit under that name, yes. Unit forty-one. Last accessed—” another pause, “—fourteen months ago.”

Fourteen months ago.

“Is the unit still active,” I say.

“The account is paid through the end of the year. Direct debit.” A shorter pause this time. “Is there anything else you need?”

“No,” I say. “Thank you.”

I hang up.

I stand in the bathroom with the phone in my hand and the tap running because I had turned it on without thinking and now the sound of water is filling the small tiled space and I let it run because the sound is useful.

Fourteen months ago someone accessed that unit. The letter my father had written was dated fourteen months ago.

He had gone there. He had gone there and he had put something inside and he had set up the direct debit to keep it intact and then he had come home and sat across from me at dinner with that same face and said nothing.

And four months later he was dead.

I turn off the tap.

I go back into the room.

Damien is where I left him, standing at the window with his back to me, looking at the city the way I had looked at it last night, like it is a problem he has been trying to solve for a long time and it keeps refusing to cooperate.

“The unit is intact,” I say. “Last accessed fourteen months ago.”

He turns.

“Then it has not been found.”

“Not yet.”

He nods once, slowly, the way he processes information, absorbing it into whatever structure he has already built around this situation before I arrived. I wonder how long he has been building it. How many nights in that room downstairs. How many hours in that chair.

“We need to get to London,” he says.

“I know.”

“If the people who had your father watched find out you are here, and find out what you know, the unit becomes the next logical place they look.”

“I know that too.”

He looks at me. “How long do you think we have.”

I think about Marcus. About a compromised operation and a leak he had not closed yet and a text I had sent him an hour ago that named a direction without naming a destination.

“Not long,” I say. “A day. Maybe less.”

The word we is sitting in the space between us and neither of us has acknowledged it yet. We need to get to London. Not I. We. He had said it without hesitating and I had not corrected him and that is its own kind of agreement, informal and unspoken and binding in the way that only the informal and unspoken things are.

“I have a plane,” he says.

“I assumed.”

“We can leave tonight.”

“There is something I need first.”

He waits.

“The name,” I say. “The person who told you I was coming. The same person who warned my father. I need to know who it is before I step on a plane with you, because if that person is a variable I cannot account for then I cannot protect either of us from whatever direction the problem comes from.”

He is quiet for a moment.

This is the thing about Damien Voss that I had forgotten and then remembered and then spent six years trying to forget again. He does not answer quickly. He considers. He weighs. You can see the mechanism of it if you know where to look, the slight change in his eyes when something moves from one column to another.

At eighteen I had found it maddening. Now I find it the most honest thing about him because at least I know the answer he gives me will be one he has actually decided on.

“His name is Colm,” he says finally. “Colm Reade. He was your father’s second before your father left the pack.”

I go very still.

Colm Reade had been at our house every Sunday for the first twelve years of my life. He had taught me to play cards. He had driven me to school twice when my father was away and my mother’s car was in the shop. He had the kind of face that was easy to trust because it had never tried to be anything other than what it was, broad and plain and permanently slightly tired.

He had stood at my father’s funeral and wept in a way I had not been able to watch directly.

“Where is he now,” I say.

“Here,” Damien says. “In Chicago. He came to me three weeks ago. He said he had been waiting to see whether you would come and when I told him you had, he asked me to make sure you heard the truth from someone who could show you the proof rather than just carry the words.”

“He is in Chicago and you did not tell me.”

“I am telling you now.”

I look at him.

He holds it without flinching, which I respect in the same complicated way I respect everything about him, reluctantly and with full awareness of the reluctance.

“I want to talk to him,” I say.

“I know.”

“Before the plane. Before London. Before any of it.”

“I expected that too.”

“Then stop managing the timeline and take me to him.”

Something moves in his expression again. That same thing I had caught in the corridor earlier, fast and almost hidden. I am starting to think it might be the specific look of a man who has been braced for a version of this person and keeps encountering a different one.

Good.

We take the elevator back up. Not to my floor. Higher. Damien keys in a code and the panel accepts it and we rise past fourteen, past seventeen, past nineteen, and stop at twenty-two.

The doors open onto a smaller corridor. One door at the end of it.

Damien knocks.

Three beats. The same spacing as the knock at my door this morning, which tells me something about how he was raised, that even his smallest habits have a consistency to them.

The door opens.

Colm Reade is older. Of course he is older, six years will do that, but it is more than time. He is the kind of older that comes from carrying something heavy for a long stretch, the kind that settles into a person’s posture and does not leave. His hair has gone fully grey. His eyes are the same.

He looks at me.

I look at him.

“Vera,” he says. And his voice breaks on it, just slightly, just the way a voice breaks when a name has been held in the mouth too long without being spoken.

“Colm,” I say.

And then I ask the question I have actually come here to ask, the one underneath all the other questions, the one that has been in the locked drawer for six years alongside my father’s face at the ceremony, calm and unsurprised.

“Did he know it was going to kill him,” I say. “Not that he was being watched. Not that there was danger. Did he know specifically that staying was going to cost him his life and did he stay anyway.”

The corridor is very quiet.

Colm looks at me for a long moment.

Then he says: “Yes.”

One word.

The wall does not fall. I will not let it fall, not here, not in front of these two men in a corridor on the twenty-second floor while the city carries on below us not caring at all.

But something behind it does. Something fundamental. The version of my father I have been grieving, the one who was taken without warning, shifts into a different shape.

A man who chose.

A man who decided that whatever was inside unit forty-one at the London Bridge facility was worth more than the years he had left.

I need to know what it is.

“We leave tonight,” I say.

I am not talking to either of them specifically.

But both of them nod.