Week five of operations. The coffee on Delaney's desk had gone cold.
She didn't look up from her laptop. Another interview with The Fighter, this one from two years ago. She was cataloging every public appearance, cross-referencing dates with Elena's social media activity, building a timeline that would prove... something. What exactly, she wasn't sure yet.
Rowan stood beside her desk, holding out a paper cup with that perpetual sunny smile. Twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Bright eyes behind wire-frame glasses. Cardigan over a button-up, like he'd wandered out of a campus library.
He wandered off, still smiling.
Delaney took a sip of the coffee. Perfect temperature. He'd remembered the oat milk.
Delaney: Stay invisible. Photos only.
She rubbed her temples. Five weeks of this. Five weeks of coordination meetings, surveillance schedules, leverage maintenance. The team was getting sloppy—Sandy had been spotted twice, Mika was falling behind on her actual work, Marshall looked like he hadn't slept in days.
And for what? A pile of circumstantial evidence and speculation?
But even as she thought it, exhaustion crept in. The thrill of the first few weeks had dulled into tedium. Conference Room B at 7 AM. The same six tired faces. The same rotation schedules. The same feeling that she was orchestrating something that had long stopped being journalism and become... something else.
She minimized The Fighter's interview and stared at her desktop—dozens of folders, each obsessively labeled. A filing system that had taken hours to perfect.
Daniel had been the opposite—obsessively organized, but only about things that made him look good. His bookshelves alphabetized, his lecture notes color-coded. But his personal life? A mess of lies and half-truths she'd spent two years trying to sort into something coherent.
She looked at her screen now. Folders. Subfolders. Timelines. Cross-references.
Her desk phone rang. Ms. Vargas's extension.
Delaney stood, catching Rowan's eye as she passed desk twelve. He was organizing someone else's files, humming quietly. When he saw her, he smiled and gave a small wave.
She didn't wave back.
In Ms. Vargas's office, the lecture was brief and pointed: "You've missed three deadlines this month. Your actual assignments—the ones you're paid for—are suffering. What's going on?"
But she just nodded. "Understood."
Back at her desk, Rowan had left a post-it note on her keyboard:
- R :)
A smiley face. An actual hand-drawn smiley face.
Delaney crumpled it and returned to her screen.
The Fighter stared back, frozen mid-laugh in that two-year-old interview.
She hit play again.
Watched that head tilt.
That smile.
Twenty-year-old Delaney's voice echoed from the margins of a biography gathering dust in her bottom drawer.
Fifty-six-year-old Delaney watched The Fighter's interview for the eighteenth time and told herself this was different.
The coffee Rowan brought had gone cold again.