The text came at eleven PM on a Wednesday.
Tomorrow. The usual place. 9 AM. — R
Aurora read it in bed. Set her phone on the nightstand. Lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about the specific quality of Ray's summons—the brevity of them, the way they didn't ask, the way the location was always embedded in the word usual like an assumption she'd agreed to that she hadn't.
She hadn't slept well in two weeks.
She got up at six. Made coffee. Stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the city assemble itself in the early light and thought about everything she knew and everything she didn't and the growing gap between those two things that she couldn't seem to close regardless of how carefully she worked.
