Next stop was the coffee shop, where I’d gotten Silvina’s message. I hadn’t gone the whole week. “Safe” or “unsafe”—these weren’t the words. But something had been broken and it didn’t feel like a sanctuary. Or even a respite.

Only one reason to go back. And I almost didn’t, except I checked the whole way. No black SUV following. No one following that I could tell, trying to remember all the bullets in PowerPoint about tailing someone from a past conference. Old-school stuff. New to me.

I slid into a chair at a rickety table facing the register. Returning to the scene of some crime. Except I didn’t know what the crime was yet.

Did I have a heightened sense of my surroundings? Yes. Was my heartbeat rapid? No.

The barista who had given me the note stood behind the counter, trying to ignore me. Half expected he wouldn’t be there. Different shift than usual or just disappeared. A gangly young man. A shadow beard. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, with a coffee shop apron over that. Though the place wasn’t much warmer than outside.

When he was free of customers, I beckoned to him. For a moment, he looked like he might flee out the back. Then what? Would I try to retrieve him?

But, instead, he asked a bored-looking woman with a nose ring and fiery red-orange hair to take over. He slid into the chair across from me, smelling of clove cigarettes. A kind of confused defiance lit his features. As if trying to get behind a cause but didn’t know what he’d signed up for.

“I told you already—the envelope got dropped off for me along with the money. No one remembers who dropped it off.”

I pulled out a hundred-dollar bill. With the way inflation had spiked, who knew how much it would be worth in a month.

“I just have a few questions. Not really about the envelope.”

He looked at me. Pity or distaste. At what? Me playing amateur detective?

“I have to serve customers again soon,” he said. But he pocketed the hundred.

“You’ve seen me in here a thousand times, right?”

A pause before he nodded, as if it was a trick question. Let’s call him “Clove,” because I’m tired of typing “he.”

“And you’ve seen a lot of other people in here around the time I’m in here who are regulars, too?”

“Yeah.” With a “So what?” subtext.

“Any of them stop coming around the last month or two?”

Clove thought about that a moment. “I think so. I think some of the regulars dropped off. There’s a new coffee shop down the road.”

“Any of them women?”

“Some. Maybe.”

“Any of them look like this?”

I slid Silvina’s photo across the table. Not a great shot, a little grainy and ten years old, but close enough.