“Me?” said Solomon. “What do you mean, me? How?”

Blackwood looked out the window, whose glass the dark night had rendered reflective. He took a moment to answer, and when he did, he did so in a low whisper.

“You will decide the outcome,” Blackwood said. He turned to see Solomon. “I am ready to see the boy now.”

Chapter

You’re doing what?”

Linus laid two carefully folded dress shirts next to his shaving kit in his luggage. “I have to go to Omaha for a few days. We need depositions from half a dozen people at this insurance company…and the partners asked me specifically.”

Odessa stood in the doorway to their bedroom, watching him pack. “You are going on a trip,” she said, echoing the words of the strange old woman in the back room of the botanica.

He buffed some dust off the top of a pair of shiny black loafers with the underside of his shirtsleeve. “I don’t know how this fell to me, but I’m ready for it. The travel office already emailed my tickets and accommodations. Business class.”

“That’s great,” she said, her mind still reeling.

“It is great,” he said. A bit of silence followed, Linus probably taking note that she seemed a little out of it. He crossed to her. “How are you doing?”

“Um…good.” She hadn’t told him anything about Hugo Blackwood. Or the botanica reading. Or the thing in the hotel sheets. She wouldn’t know where to begin.

Linus rubbed her upper arms, waiting for her to focus on him. “Come with me,” he said.

She sputtered. “Omaha? Nebraska?”

“I hear it’s actually pretty great. And I’ll be wall-to-wall with depositions, but you can see the town, and we can do dinner. Maybe squeeze an extra day out of it.”

“Right,” she said.

“This is the perfect opportunity to get away. This will be good for you. In fact, this is exactly what you need right now.”

Odessa was nodding, because he was right. But it wasn’t that simple. “I know.”

“Room service breakfast…?” he said, hoping to entice her. “Hotel spa for you…? We can work out in the gym…?”

He was endearingly persuasive about it. And she should go, she knew that. But the old woman’s words…

“You’re going on a trip?” Odessa said again, trying to get her head around it. A coincidence?

Linus touched her chin, as though focusing her attention on him. “Come with me,” he said.

Odessa smiled, won over by the sentiment, by his tenderness. But she knew that if she went, she’d be standing by the window of the hotel in a bathrobe with her mind back in Newark on Walt Leppo and grave robbers and a peculiar British man.

She backed away. “I’d love to…”

“But what?”