She sent the text at exactly eight PM.
Where do we meet?
She'd been sitting on her bed for twenty minutes before she sent it — dressed already, black hoodie, gray sweatpants, hair pulled back, no jewelry, no driver scheduled. Just her and the decision she'd spent fourteen hours arriving at and still didn't feel right about.
The response came in forty seconds.
Same place.
She looked at the message.
Stood up.
Left.
***
She drove herself.
That had been deliberate — no driver meant no record of the route, no one who could be questioned later about where she'd gone and at what time. She'd thought about that for approximately thirty seconds before deciding it and had thought about it again in the car, sitting at a red light on forty-seventh, and had almost turned around twice.
She hadn't turned around.
The Phantom Club looked the same as the night before. Empty building. Industrial lights. The specific chill of a space that didn't have anyone's comfort in mind.
