Chapter 4
I gave Adrian the original photograph because the woman outside had stopped pretending to be passing by.
She stood beneath the diner awning with one hand wrapped around the strap of a dark purse. Rain slid from the edge of the roof in a steady silver line between us. Her black glasses hid most of her face, but I remembered the angle of her head from the picture. She had watched the cafe entrance without looking like she was watching it.
Adrian kept his back to the window.
“Describe her,” he said.
“Gray coat. Black glasses. Dark purse.”
“Anything else?”
“She’s looking at us.”
His hand rested beside the coffee cup. Not clenched. Not shaking. Still, the air around him changed. He looked less like a man sitting in a diner and more like someone measuring exits.
The waitress came by with the coffee pot. “Everything okay?”
Adrian glanced at me before answering.
“We’re fine,” I said.
The woman outside turned away.
I pushed out of the booth.
Adrian’s hand moved, then stopped before it reached me. He remembered the boundary I’d made in the hospital, the one he’d agreed to without argument: no grabbing, no deciding for me, no security detail appearing at my shoulder.
“I’m going to the restroom,” I said.
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You’re going to the back door.”
“I’m going to see whether she leaves.”
“Claire.”
“If she followed us, I need to know how.”
That was the first time his expression softened without pity. He looked at the original photograph between us, then slid it back across the table.
“I’ll stay here.”
“You’ll stay visible.”
“I will.”
I walked past the counter and through the narrow hallway. The restroom door stood open, its mirror spotted with water marks. At the end of the hall, a gray metal door led toward the kitchen and the parking lot behind the diner.
A cook glanced up from a grill. “You need something?”
“Just air.”
He pointed with his spatula. “Door sticks.”
It did. I leaned my shoulder into it and stepped into the wet alley behind the building.
The woman was gone from the front.
A car engine started on the street. Through the gap between two buildings, I saw a dark sedan pull away. I caught only the rear plate—three numbers, then mud—and the small white square stuck to the back window.
A parking permit.
I had seen one like it at Bellini’s Cafe.
Not on a customer’s car. On a delivery van parked across from the side entrance.
I went back inside with my pulse beating hard against the bandage beneath my blouse.
Adrian was standing now, one hand on the table. He hadn’t followed me. That mattered more than I wanted it to.
“She left in a dark sedan,” I said. “The rear window had a white parking permit.”
“Which kind?”
“I don’t know. I’ve seen the same square at the cafe.”
He sat. “Where?”
“Across from the side entrance. The morning of the shooting, there was a van there with one on the rear window.”
“You remember a permit from that morning?”
“I remember anything that let me avoid looking at the gun.”
His gaze held mine.
I pulled the copied photograph from my bag and opened it beside the original. The woman stood near the cafe entrance in both images, though the second angle showed only part of the street. In the corner, behind her shoulder, a white square marked the windshield of a parked vehicle.
I leaned closer.
The square wasn’t a permit.
It was a laminated access tag with a blue diagonal stripe.
“Those weren’t public parking spaces,” I said. “The cafe had a service agreement with the building next door. Deliveries used the side entrance.”
Adrian looked from the image to me. “How does that prove planning?”
“It proves she wasn’t waiting for a table.” I tapped the photograph. “She was standing where she could see both entrances. And the person in this picture”—I pointed to the blurred shoulder behind her—“was carrying a delivery clipboard.”
“You think the shooter came through the service entrance.”
“I think someone knew exactly where Sofia would be when the gunfire started.”
Adrian didn’t argue. He took out his phone and photographed both pages without touching them.
“Send me the copies,” he said.
“No.”
His eyes lifted.
“You already have the original for now. You can look at it here. You don’t take it out of my sight.”
“That’s fair.”
The easy agreement unsettled me more than resistance would have.
He turned the photograph around and studied the background. “The cafe’s building manager may have access logs.”
“May?”
“I don’t own every person who works near me.”
“That sounded rehearsed.”
“It’s a fact.”
I put the papers back in my bag. “I need to go home.”
“You shouldn’t go alone.”
“I am going alone.”
“Then let me drive you.”
I almost refused. The offer sat between us, practical and clean. No promise. No claim. Just a ride through rain.
“Public streets,” I said. “No detours.”
“Agreed.”
“And you don’t tell Sofia I’m coming.”
His jaw tightened at her name, but he nodded. “Agreed.”
We paid separately. Outside, the rain had thinned to mist. Adrian walked beside me without touching me, leaving enough space for me to breathe.
At the curb, I glanced back at the diner window.
The woman in the gray coat was no longer there.
But on the wet sidewalk beneath the awning, someone had left a small white square of laminated plastic.
A blue stripe cut across it.
I bent to pick it up.
On the back, written in black marker, were two words.
BELLINI STAFF.
Adrian read them over my shoulder.
May you like
Neither of us spoke.
I slipped the tag into my pocket, and this time, when he opened the passenger door, I got in.
