The Copper Lantern sat tucked behind the financial district in a strip of places that didn’t put prices on the windows, and the wine list alone probably cost more than Wes’s monthly rent.
He smoothed his blazer and checked his reflection in the glass door until the man staring back looked like money, then walked to the hostess stand with a casual bored expression.
“Table for one. Somewhere quiet, near the window,” said Wes.
The hostess seated him perfectly, because three tables away, in a velvet booth with her back to the wall, sat Meredith Fane in person.
She was even more striking than the photograph, blonde hair pinned up in a way that screamed old money, pearls at her throat, a glass of white untouched in front of her like a prop.
Sitting across from her was a man in his late fifties in a tailored charcoal suit, silver hair combed back, wearing a watch that probably had its own security detail, and everything about him, the stillness, the way the waiter refilled his water without being asked and got out of the light, said apex predator.
Wes ordered a glass of expensive red and a small appetizer he couldn’t pronounce, then pulled out his phone and scrolled a news feed with his thumb hovering over the camera shutter, waiting.
He didn’t wait long, because at the next table a group of tourists erupted into loud laughter over a spilled drink, and the noise gave him his opening.
The girl at the table beside his had been glancing his way since he sat down, a redhead in a blazer with conference lanyard and kind eyes, and Wes leaned toward her.
“I’m so sorry, but do you have any idea what the truffle reduction actually is? My waiter keeps describing it in riddles,” said Wes.
She giggled and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“It’s basically fancy mushroom gravy. You look like you’re having a rough night.”
“Just a long day of negotiations. I was hoping for a quiet dinner and instead I’m being interrogated by my own appetizer,” said Wes, flashing her a weary, charming smile, and her name was Marnie, he learned forty seconds later, in town for a finance conference, hating it, and within two minutes she was laughing with her whole shoulder leaning into his airspace.
And while she talked, Wes became a shadow.
His phone drifted up in his right hand like it was nothing, angled over her shoulder, and between one of her sentences and the next he took three clean shots of the velvet booth.
Fane leaning in close.
The silver-haired man sliding a thick white envelope across the table, fat as a brick.
Fane’s fingers closing over it without either of them breaking eye contact.
Then the man stood, buttoned his jacket, and Fane rose with him, and they were leaving early, and Wes slapped down cash for a meal he’d barely touched while Marnie gave him a disappointed look.
“I have to run. Duty calls,” said Wes.
“Wait, I didn’t get your name!” said Marnie.
“The Prince. Just ask around,” said Wes with a wink, and he slipped out the door just as Fane and the man reached the sidewalk and started walking toward a side street where a black sedan idled with its hazards off.
Wes stayed twenty paces back, glued to the shopfronts, breathing through his mouth, heart going like a drumline.
“Hey, watch it, kid!”
The shout cracked down the street, and Fane’s head turned.
Wes’s brain went white for half a second, and then it did the only thing it knew how to do anymore.
It reached for a script.
There were three elderly women filing out of the Marbury civic theater twenty feet to his left, coats and canes and slow, and Wes stumbled straight into the middle of them with his hand flying to his chest.
“Oh my deepest apologies, ladies, I’m so clumsy today!” said Wes.
And then he committed, because half measures got people caught.
He offered his arm to the woman in the middle like a doting grandson, tucked her hand into his elbow, and started steering the whole slow trio down the crowded sidewalk, clucking over the uneven pavement, pointing out the curb, keeping his eyes on Fane over their silver heads while one of the ladies patted his wrist and told him he was a lovely boy.
Fane’s gaze swept the crowd and lingered exactly where he’d been standing, on the old ladies and the helpful young man in the blazer walking them along.
She didn’t see a spy, because nobody on earth looks at a grandson and thinks surveillance.
She turned back and stepped into the sedan, and the door slammed, and it pulled away into traffic.
Wes walked the ladies another half block out of pure manners, then stopped under a streetlamp and bowed over the middle one’s hand.
“You’re all far too kind. Have a lovely evening, ladies.”
“Oh, such a nice young man,” said the middle one.
“Does your grandmother know how handsome you’ve gotten?”
“Goodnight!” said Wes, and he sprinted around the corner, ducked into the shadow of a closed pharmacy, and yanked out his phone with his hands finally allowed to shake.
The photos were perfect.
All three.
The man’s face in full, sharp, turned toward the camera like he’d posed for it.
The envelope passing between them, thick and white and in the corner of the second shot, clean and readable, the sedan’s license plate.
Wes stood in the dark and looked at the three things he couldn’t unsee.
The envelope, the face and the plate.
Three little bricks, and some cold new part of his brain, the part that had started keeping a corkboard, quietly copied the originals into a hidden album before he cropped and sent the three best shots to the private number Hollis had written on the back of the photograph.
He didn’t let himself think about just in case of what.
Then he stood under the streetlamp and watched his screen, waiting for the dots.
Three dots appeared.
The dots died.
Nothing.
Ten minutes passed.
Wes walked.
Twenty minutes passed, a whole mile of sidewalk, and he refreshed the thread so many times the screen heat burned his thumb, rehearsing what he’d even say, how he’d describe the tail, the biker, the grandmothers, building the report in his head.
BZZT!
He unlocked it so fast he nearly dropped the phone.
Professor Hollis: Ok.
Wes stared at the two letters.
“Ok,” said Wes.
“Ok? That’s it?”
He let out a dry, frustrated laugh right there on the sidewalk, loud enough that a guy walking a dog looked over, and he shoved the phone back in his pocket.
He had just dodged a delivery bike at thirty miles an hour, committed federal Grandma, and used three elderly women as moving camouflage, all for a two-letter brush-off.
But standing there under the streetlamp with his pulse still up, looking down at his expensive shoes, he realized it didn’t actually sting the way it should have.
Because she could keep her Ok.
The win was already his, and nobody could take it back.
He had walked into a stranger’s restaurant, invented a life, flirted a woman into being his camera blind, tailgated a predator across six blocks, and gotten out clean, and every single second of it had been performance, blocking, timing, script, and it had worked, all of it, on real people, in the real world, with real consequences.
Reggie was right.
The world really was a stage.
Wes started walking toward the transit corridor, and he was smiling before he knew it, because he was starting to love the lead role.