Chapter 22 A Breakfast Meeting

Chapter 22 A Breakfast Meeting
POV: Wren

The restaurant had white tablecloths.
That was the first thing I clocked walking in, white tablecloths and low lighting and the specific quiet of a place that filtered its customers before they arrived. Marcus had a reservation. Of course he had a reservation. He had probably made it before his flight, or before whatever car he had taken instead of the flight, sitting somewhere with a phone and a list of moves arranged in order.
We were seated at a corner table. Marcus took the chair with the wall behind it without appearing to choose it. I sat across from him. Callum sat between us at the side, which put him in the position of watching both our faces without fully facing either of us, and I wondered if that was Marcus's arrangement or Callum's instinct.
A server came. Marcus ordered for the table without looking at the menu, which meant he had been here before, which meant this restaurant was a choice with a reason behind it.
"The paper," Marcus said, once the server left. "How long have you been on staff?"
"Two years," I said.
"And before that. You wrote for your high school paper?"
I picked up my water glass. "Briefly."
"Briefly." He repeated the word the way people repeated words when they wanted you to know they had noticed the weight you put on it. "Student journalism is an interesting pipeline. Most students who pursue it seriously have a specific moment that hooked them. A story that mattered."
I drank my water and said nothing.
He moved on without pressing, which was its own kind of pressure. "The scholarship committee review. End of semester, you said. Those committees tend to look at output volume and impact reach. How's your pipeline looking?"
"Productive," I said.
"Anything significant in development?"
He asked it the same way he asked everything, in the register of mild interest, the way someone asked about the weather in a city they were considering visiting. But his eyes were on me with the same thoroughness they had held on the path outside, and underneath the mild interest was the absolute certainty of someone who already knew the answer and was asking to see what version I would offer.
"Several pieces," I said. "Standard development timeline."
"Of course." He unfolded his napkin. "Investigative work takes time to do properly. Sourcing, verification, legal review. Rushing it creates problems."
Callum reached for his water glass. Slowly. The way you reached for something when you needed your hands to be doing something visible and ordinary.
The food arrived. I ate because not eating would have been information. Marcus ate and asked about the paper's editorial structure, the relationship between student editors and faculty advisors, the process for flagging stories with potential legal sensitivity. Every question had a surface that sounded like professional curiosity and a floor that was something else entirely.
I answered the surface. Every time. Redirected at the floor without appearing to redirect.
The meal took forty minutes. By the end of it Marcus had asked fourteen questions, I had actually answered four of them, and Callum had said maybe twelve words total, sitting at the side of the table with the stillness of someone who had learned young that stillness was the only move that cost his father nothing to use against him.
I was beginning to understand what that kind of stillness required.
Marcus set his napkin on the table. "I'll get the bill." He stood and moved toward the front of the restaurant and the moment his back was to us Callum leaned across the table.
"Everything he asked you was a test," he said quietly. Fast, the words tight and low. "The pipeline question, the legal review question, the sourcing timeline. He was mapping what you know he's looking for and seeing how you covered it."
"I know," I said.
"He'll use whatever you gave him."
"I gave him nothing he didn't already have."
Callum sat back. Looked at his father's back at the front of the room. "He's going to move today. Whatever he's planning, it starts today."
Marcus turned from the front desk and walked back toward us and Callum straightened and picked up his coffee and by the time Marcus reached the table we were both just two people finishing breakfast.
"Shall we?" Marcus said.
We walked out into the morning. The street outside was narrow, a few people moving past, a delivery truck idling at the kerb. Marcus said something to Callum about the foundation's campus schedule, two meetings this afternoon, and Callum responded in the minimal way he had been responding all morning, and I walked on Marcus's other side and watched the street and thought about the fourteen questions and which four I had actually answered and whether any of those four had given him a thread he didn't already have.
I didn't think so.
At the corner Marcus shook Callum's hand, which was a strange thing to do with your son, and nodded at me with the warm professional smile, and said it was wonderful to finally meet me, and turned and walked toward a black car idling twenty meters down the street.
I watched him go.
Then I looked down at my jacket because something felt different about it and I couldn't immediately locate why.
My press badge was clipped to my left lapel the way it always was. I had worn it in because I came from the paper building and hadn't thought to take it off.
I looked at the badge. At the small printed number beneath my name, the press registration number assigned by the university media office, the one that linked to my full staff profile in the internal system, the one that gave access to my publication history, my faculty contacts, my current story registrations.
The badge was angled slightly outward.
It had not been angled outward when I sat down. I clipped it straight, every time, a habit so automatic I didn't think about it.
Someone had touched it.
I looked up at the black car pulling away from the kerb down the street. Marcus's window was up. His phone was probably already in his hand.
He had photographed the badge number at some point during the meal without me seeing him do it.
I had been watching him the entire time.
And I had still missed it.