“Hell no,” she said, settling down in front of the controls. “Somebody’s got to drive.”

They had been working together like this for so long that it was like dancing with a very well known and trusted partner. Rivera often froze the flow of the video in the split second before Angie or Tony could ask her to, either to catch up with note taking or to talk about a particular shot. Sometimes it was no more than an expression on a face perfectly lit by the late-afternoon sun, but there were dozens of segments that made Angie catch her breath and remember, with complete clarity, what she loved about her work, and why she was here.

Which had nothing to do with John Grant, not in the first line.

“Angie?” Rivera was saying.

“Sorry. What?”

“Could you put my mark next to this bit of John and Miss Zula talking?

“Sure.” Angie picked up her red pen to draw a star next to the entry that read 02:02:38:13, 02:04:04:13, JG talking 2 ZB re fall schedule. Z 2 Louie asleep & pan around office and got a blob of ink instead. She turned her head.

“Where’s Markus?”

“He left a half hour ago to run errands for his mother,” Tony said. “Jeez, Ang. You drag us in here at the crack of dawn and then you fall asleep yourself.”

“I’m not sleeping,” Angie said steadily. “I was concentrating. Hold up, I’ve got to go get another pen.”

John came into the reception area just as Angie was closing the door to the supply closet. She stopped where she was and tried to smile, but didn’t quite manage. Breathing was almost as hard.

He was dressed in a dark gray summer-weight suit with a deep red tie over a snowy white shirt, and Angie had a sudden memory of the dry cleaners he used in Manhattan. The woman behind the counter—small and round with a heavy Slavic accent—had talked to John as an indulgent but hard-to-please grandmother might have. Angie had come to the conclusion that he liked it, or he would have taken his business to one of the hundreds of other dry cleaners in the city.

She said, “What was that woman’s name, the one who called you booby?”

John smiled so suddenly and so beautifully that Angie’s breath hitched and caught and she thought, Where the hell have you been? But she bit her lip to keep from saying it.

“Mrs. Pulaski. I think about her, too, every time I put on a suit. The dry cleaner here is Miss Nellie, and she calls me John-John. I miss Mrs. Pulaski.”

“You haven’t been back here all that long,” Angie said. “Cheer up, I’m sure you’ll find some shop clerk willing to abuse you to your face.”

“Probably not in Ogilvie,” John said. “Mostly people wait until you’re out of hearing to bad-mouth you.”