He goes three weeks without touching the laptop.
Not the encrypted folder specifically — everything. He leaves his personal laptop on the desk and he goes to work and comes home and reads the medical journals and watches, occasionally, something mindless on television and eats what Nadia brings him and drinks less than he has been drinking.
He is, he realizes, trying out the concept of ordinary life.
It is awkward, the way any skill is awkward at the beginning when you have been practicing a different one for so long. He does not know what to do with evening hours that are not organized around the work. He stands in his apartment and cannot locate the thing he is supposed to want.
He calls Marcus on a Saturday. Not about anything specific. Just calls.
"You sound different," Marcus says.
"Good different or bad different?"
"I don't know yet." A pause. The dogs. Always the dogs. "You coming out sometime?"
"Yeah."
"You said that last month."
"I'll come next weekend."
"Good." A pause. "How's the other thing."
Gideon looks at the window. "Done."
Marcus is quiet for a moment. "Done done?"
"Done."
Another silence. He can hear Marcus processing this — not with surprise, but with the weight of a man who has been alongside something for a long time and now feels its absence in the structure.
"Good," Marcus says. Just that. Good. The same word he uses for everything that matters and requires no elaboration.
"Yeah."
"So what now?"
Gideon thinks about Deborah Roseline. He thinks about the dinner, which was three weeks ago and which he has not acted on and has not stopped thinking about either. He thinks about the encrypted folder, closed and quiet on the laptop. He thinks about the board in her apartment — he has not seen it, but he knows it exists. He can feel the geometry of it.
"I don't know," he says. "I haven't gotten there yet."
"That's fine," Marcus says. "That's actually fine."
They talk for twenty minutes about nothing important. When Marcus hangs up, Gideon sits with the phone in his hand for a while.
Then he picks it up and dials Deborah's number.
She answers on the second ring.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi." A pause. "Are you free Friday?"
A silence on her end. Not long — three seconds at most. "I can be."
"Dinner," he says. "The Vietnamese place. Seven."
"Okay," she says. She sounds like someone who is keeping her voice very level. "Seven."
He hangs up. He looks at the apartment — the sparse, precise apartment, the amber lamp, the face-down photograph.
He goes to the window.
Outside, Philadelphia does what it always does.
He watches it for a while, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, he watches it without cataloging it for anything. Just watching.