He had been keeping a list without meaning to keep one and he arrived at this conclusion by the process of elimination, having exhausted every other explanation for why a specific set of information about Ava Chen had installed itself in his memory with a permanence and detail that had nothing to do with its professional relevance.
He sat at his desk on a Thursday evening when the floor was empty and the city was dark and he let himself look at the list honestly for the first time rather than examining individual items in isolation and redirecting before they could form a pattern.
He knew how she took her coffee. Black with no sugar, always the same temperature, and she held the cup with both hands when she was thinking through something difficult. He had never been told this. He had acc
