The cursor blinks, a tiny white pulse in the empty field. Her thumb hovers over the keyboard, not quite touching the glass. "I don't know yet." The words stare back at her, honest in a way she hadn't meant to be honest. She watches them sit there, unsent.
Her thumb presses the lock button instead. The screen goes black, her own reflection folding into the dark—sharp cheekbones, pale eyes, the severe line of a mouth that's learned to keep its secrets. The phone lands face-down on the passenger seat, beside the folder.
The photograph shifts against her collarbone. A small, warm weight she's been carrying since she tore it from the file. She doesn't pull it out to look at it. She knows the exact angle of the scar through his eyebrow. The exact shape of the stillness that settles over his face when he forgets he's being watched.
The engine idles beneath her, a low vibration through the leather seat, through her thighs, up her spine. The parking lot light buzzes overhead, casting a sickly yellow hum across the asphalt. At the edge of the lot, the chain-link fence glows red where her taillights paint it, rust and blood and iron.
She checks the clock on the dash. 11:47 PM. Forty-seven hours until she walks into the Riverview Gallery, notebook in hand, and watches Mason Vale perform for a room full of strangers. Forty-seven hours to decide what she's looking for.
She shifts in her seat. The leather creaks. The smell of exhaust and stale cigarette smoke drifts through the vents, mixing with the faint vanilla from the air freshener dangling from the rearview. She hasn't moved this car in twenty minutes.
The photo presses against her skin. A question she can't answer.
Her hand moves to the gear shift. She doesn't engage it. Just rests her palm on the cool plastic, feeling the vibration travel through her fingers, through her wrist, settling somewhere deep in her chest. The engine hums. The fence glows. The cursor blinks somewhere inside her pocket, waiting for a reply she isn't ready to send.
She doesn't know yet.
She shifts into drive. The gear clicks, a sound that feels heavier than it should. She pulls out of the spot, the red fence dissolving in her rearview mirror. She takes the long way through the city, past glowing storefronts and empty intersections, counting the seconds until she has to decide which version of Mason Vale she's willing to believe in.
The address blurs past—a laundromat, a shuttered bodega, a church with its iron gate pulled closed. She signals, checks the mirror, pulls into the empty lot of a twenty-four-hour diner. The neon sign hums in the windshield: *OPEN* in pink cursive, the *P* flickering like a heartbeat. She kills the engine.
The silence rushes in. No vibration through the seat, no hum through her spine. Just the tick of cooling metal and the distant clatter of dishes from inside the diner, where a single waitress moves behind the counter, wiping the same spot on the Formica.
Her thumb finds the phone before she decides to reach for it. The screen glows when she presses the button—his message at the top of the notification stack, unread since she left the parking lot. She hasn't opened it. Hasn't let herself.
Three words, across her thumbprint scanner's smudged glass: *I'll be honest.*
She opens it.
*I'll be honest, I looked you up. Google, not the file. I know how this works—you're supposed to watch me, not the other way around. But I wanted to see who was going to be in the room.* Another message, sent twenty-three minutes later: *You don't post much. That's rare. It makes me curious.*
The cursor blinks at the bottom of the thread. She can type anything. She can type nothing. The diner's pink light paints the dashboard, washes across her knuckles, catches the fine hairs on her forearm. She looks up, through the windshield, at the empty street. The *P* keeps flickering.
She reads his message again. *You don't post much. That's rare. It makes me curious.* The words don't sound like a line. They don't sound rehearsed. She hates that she can't tell the difference yet—hates that she's already looking for the crack instead of the polish. She types: *What did you find?*
Her thumb hovers over send. The cursor waits. The waitress inside the diner wipes the same spot, a white circle on the pink counter, over and over, the rag moving in a slow, practiced arc. Eva presses send and sets the phone face-down on the passenger seat, beside the folder, beside the photograph she still hasn't looked at again.
The engine clicks as it cools. The neon hums. She waits, her palm flat on the gear shift, counting the seconds until the screen glows again—or doesn't, which is also an answer, and one she's not sure she's ready to read.
Her thumb lifts off the gear shift before the second buzz finishes. The phone is cold against her palm, the screen already bright with his name—Mason Vale, no last name needed, just the three syllables that have been rattling through her head since she tore his photograph from the file. She turns it over. Reads.
*I found a lot of nothing.* A pause in the thread, a new message sent eleven seconds later: *Which is impressive, actually. Most people leave crumbs. You've swept the floor clean.* Another gap, shorter this time, like he was still typing when he decided to send: *Except your bylines. Those are harder to bury. The one about the library in Bensenville—the one that closed after the budget cuts. You wrote that like you'd sat in those chairs.*
The diner light catches the glass, washes pink across his words. She reads them again. Then again. Her thumb rests on the edge of the screen, not quite covering the letters. *You wrote that like you'd sat in those chairs.* She remembers the piece—three years ago, her first feature for a regional weekly, the one Diane had pulled from the slush pile and run with barely an edit. She'd spent a week in that library. Sat in those chairs. Talked to the children's librarian, a woman named Gloria who'd cried when she talked about the summer reading program. She'd never mentioned that in the piece. But it was there, in the rhythm of the sentences, in the way she'd described the light through the tall windows.
She tilts her head, the way she does when she's trying to read someone. The way she's doing now, alone in her car, reading a man she's never met through the shape of his sentences. *You wrote that like you'd sat in those chairs.* Not a compliment, not a question. An observation. A mirror held up to the thing she'd tried to hide inside the words.
Her thumb moves before she decides. She types: *You read the library piece.* She pauses. Deletes it. Types again: *That piece was three years ago. You went back that far.* Sends it before she can stop herself.
The phone buzzes almost immediately. *I told you. I wanted to see who was going to be in the room.* A pause. Then: *You made Gloria cry. In a good way. She sent the piece to the city council. Didn't save the library, but it made them read it out loud at a meeting. That's not nothing.*
Eva stares at the screen. The cursor blinks at the bottom of the thread, waiting for her to say something. She doesn't know how to respond to this—to the fact that he knows Gloria's name, that he knows about the city council meeting, that he read a three-year-old feature from a regional weekly and remembered it well enough to quote it back to her in a parking lot at midnight. The pink light shimmers on the dashboard. The *P* keeps flickering.
She types: *How do you know about the city council meeting?* Sends it. Then, before she can second-guess: *Were you there?*
The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. She watches them pulse, counting the seconds, her palm flat on the gear shift, the engine silent, the neon humming, the photograph pressing against her collarbone like a question she's been carrying too long to put down.
*No,* he writes. *But I know someone who was.* Then, after a long pause: *I should let you sleep. You have a big night tomorrow.* A pause. *I'll be at the gallery by six. Early arrivals get the good champagne.*
She doesn't reply. Her thumb hovers over the keyboard, but there's nothing to say that won't sound like she's already decided something she hasn't. She locks the phone. Sets it face-down on the passenger seat, beside the folder, beside the photograph she still hasn't looked at again. The neon hums. The *P* flickers. She sits in the dark, her palm on the gear shift, counting the hours until she walks into a room full of strangers and watches a man she's never met perform for a crowd of people who think they know him.