"Tell me," Gerald said.
His voice was low and steady. The hand holding hers had not loosened and she was grateful for that, for the anchor of it while everything else in her head rearranged itself around a face she recognized in a third floor window across the street.
"Gladys." He shifted closer. "Who is it?"
She kept her eyes on the window. The silhouette hadn't moved, still there, phone glow faint, watching with the patience of someone who had been doing this long enough to be comfortable at it.
"Marcus Webb," she said.
Gerald went still beside her. "Webb. As in Richard Webb's son."
"As in Richard Webb's son." She finally looked away from the window and met Gerald's eyes.
"He and Dave went to the same business school. They were close for about two years until a deal fell apart, something to do with a joint acquisition that Dave pulled out of at the last minute. Webb lost a significant amount of money. He blamed Dave personally."
"That was four years ago."
"Yes."
"He's been sitting on this for four years."
"Apparently." She picked up her glass and realized her hand was completely steady, which surprised her. "He approached me once, wbout eight months ago at a charity function.
Dave appeared before the conversation went anywhere and Webb left. I thought nothing of it at the time."
"He was testing access," Gerald said quietly. "Seeing how close he could get."
"And now he's watching us through a window with a camera phone." She set the glass down. "Which means he has been for a while. Which means whatever he's planning he thinks he has enough."
Gerald looked back toward the window, the silhouette was gone. They both saw it at the same moment, the empty dark rectangle where Marcus Webb had been standing and the absence was somehow worse than the presence.
"He's moving," Gerald said.
"Or he got what he needed."
Gerald was already on his feet. He put enough cash on the table to cover twice their tab and held out his hand. She took it without hesitation, they were past the careful distance now, past all of it and they were out the door in thirty seconds.
The street was busy enough that finding one man should have been difficult, but It wasn't.
Marcus Webb was half a block north, walking at the unhurried pace of someone who was not running because running would imply he had done something wrong and Marcus Webb had clearly decided he had not.
He was exactly as she remembered, tall, lean, the kind of handsome that had curdled slightly into something less appealing with age and bitterness.
Gerald saw him the same moment she did.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not going to do anything."
"You have your confrontation face on."
"I don't have a confrontation face."
"Gerald."
He exhaled and stopped walking. She felt the effort it cost him, the deliberate loosening of the tension in his hand where it held hers and appreciated it.
Webb turned a corner and disappeared.
"We follow him we tip our hand," she said. "He doesn't know we made him. That's the only advantage we have right now."
Gerald looked at the corner for a moment. Then he nodded once. "You're right."
"I know." She turned back toward the bar. "Come on. We need to figure out what he has."
They went back to the corner table. The bar had filled slightly in their absence, a group near the door, a couple at the counter and the anonymity was still intact. Gerald ordered two more drinks neither of them would finish and spread what they had on the table between them.
Two photographs, same handwriting. Delivered separately, timed precisely to her first day at Stone Enterprises.
"He wanted to destabilize me before I had my footing," she said. "First day, new environment, photographs that imply surveillance. Most people would go straight to Dave."
"And Dave would pull you out of the building."
"Which removes me from Calloway." She tapped the photograph. "The acquisition closes in six weeks. If Stone Enterprises loses momentum on the deal at this stage the whole thing collapses. Webb gets his disruption without ever showing his hand to anyone who matters."
Gerald was watching her with an expression she couldn't fully read. "You put that together fast."
"I've been watching Dave run this company my entire adult life." She met his eyes. "I know how it works. I know where it's fragile."
"Which is exactly why Webb chose you as the pressure point."
"Yes." She sat back. "He underestimated one thing."
"What's that?"
"That I'm not going to Dave." She held Gerald's gaze. "We handle this ourselves. Quietly. Before Webb makes his next move."
Gerald looked at her for a long moment. Something moved through his expression, not surprise exactly, more like recognition. Like a man seeing something he had suspected for years finally confirmed.
"What are you thinking?" he asked.
"Webb needs the photographs to mean something. Right now they show us in proximity, a fundraiser, a street conversation, nothing definitive." She paused. "Except the one from tonight doesn't exist yet. He was taking it when we spotted him which means he doesn't have it."
"He has whatever he took before we looked up."
"Which is us sitting at a corner table." She allowed herself a small smile. "Having a business conversation."
"Is that what we were having."
"That's what anyone looking at a long-lens photograph of two people at a bar table would conclude." She folded the photographs and slid them into her bag. "We need to find out what else he has. Financial records, communications, anything that connects him to the surveillance. If we can build a case before he moves we take it to Dave on our terms. Not his."
Gerald nodded slowly. "I have someone who can trace the surveillance equipment. The camera quality on these prints is specific enough to narrow the manufacturer."
"How long?"
"Forty-eight hours."
"Then we have forty-eight hours before Webb makes his next move." She looked at him. "Can you keep this from Dave until then?"
"Dave has a board dinner tomorrow and site visits Wednesday morning, I can manage it." A pause. "Can you?"
"Dave and I are not exactly speaking at the moment."
Something shifted in Gerald's expression. "The conversation in his office."
"He admitted it. Patrick. The relationship he ended." She kept her voice even. "He didn't apologize, he explained."
"There's a difference."
"That's what I said." She looked at her glass. "He's going to come to my apartment tonight. He always does when we've argued, shows up with food and the absolute conviction that proximity will fix whatever he broke."
"And when he does?"
"I'll let him come. I'll eat whatever he brings.
And I won't tell him anything." She met Gerald's
eyes. "Because the only way to protect the Calloway deal and expose Webb and keep Dave from dismantling my entire life in the name of keeping me safe is to stay exactly where I am and know more than everyone else in the room."
Gerald looked at her for a long moment. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, and said: "When did you become this?"
"This?"
"This." He gestured a small movement that somehow indicated all of her. "Three steps ahead, completely composed. Running the board before anyone else knows there is one."
She held his gaze. "I've always been this, nobody looked long enough to notice."
He was quiet for a moment, then: "I noticed."
The bar hummed around them. She was acutely aware of the distance across the table, less than it had been before, closer than professional, exactly where they had been when his hand had touched her jaw and everything simplified.
"Gerald." She kept her voice low. "What happened earlier"
"Stands," he said. Simply. No negotiation in it.
"Dave"
"Stands," he said again. "Whatever comes next with Dave, whatever this costs, I made my decision. I made it a long time ago." His eyes held hers. "The only question is what you decide."
She opened her mouth to answer.
Her phone rang.
It was Dave. His name filling the screen with the inevitability of a man who always knew when something was happening without knowing what.
She looked at Gerald, he nodded once, then she answered.
"Hey." She kept her voice perfectly even.
"Where are you?" Dave's voice was controlled. "I went to your office, you'd already left."
"I needed air. Long first day."
"Are you alone?"
She looked across the table at Gerald, his eyes steady on hers, his expression completely calm, the photograph hidden in her bag and forty-eight hours ticking between them and whatever Marcus Webb was planning next.
"Yes," she said.
"Good." He paused and continued, "I'm outside your building. I brought food."
"I'll be there in twenty minutes."
She hung up.
Gerald had not looked away from her once.
"Twenty minutes," he said.
"Twenty minutes," she confirmed. She stood, picked up her bag, and looked at him one final time across the table. "Find me what Webb has. Before he uses it."
She was almost at the door when Gerald spoke behind her.
"Gladys."
She turned.
"He knows," Gerald said quietly. "Not about Webb, about us." He paused. "I could see it in his face this afternoon before I came to find you. He knows something shifted and he's already moving to contain it."
She held Gerald's gaze across the bar.
"Then we move faster," she said.
She pushed through the door into the night and walked straight into Marcus Webb.
