Chapter 54: See You Again
Ross was standing outside the gym, which was not where Andrew had expected to encounter anyone he knew, and his expression was the specific one he wore when reality had recently declined to cooperate with him.
"You and Susan." He said it like a question that hadn't finished forming. "How did you — I mean, she never—" He stopped. Started again. "She doesn't smile at people, Andrew."
"We had lunch. After training."
"She doesn't smile," Ross repeated, as though Andrew had missed the point entirely.
Andrew checked the skill panel out of habit.
[Boxing (Proficient): 58/100]
[Martial Arts (Proficient): 71/100]
Three days of consistent work. Bolton had stopped going easy on him by the second session, which was its own kind of compliment.
"Ross." He looked at him properly. Ross had the look of someone who'd been living slightly outside his own skin for weeks — the hair that had migrated from disheveled to structural concern, the coat that hadn't been hung up in a while. He'd been pulling away from the group gradually, everyone could see it, his whole attention tunneled down to one problem he couldn't solve by working harder at it. "How long have you been standing out here?"
Ross's eyes shifted. "I was in the neighborhood."
He wasn't. The gym was not in anyone's neighborhood incidentally.
Before Andrew could figure out what to do with that, Carol came around the corner from the direction of the parking structure, bag over her shoulder, and stopped when she saw them both.
The three of them stood on the sidewalk for a moment with the specific discomfort of people who each knew different parts of the same difficult situation.
Carol recovered first. Her face did something complicated — not guilt, not exactly, but the expression of someone who had been carrying weight long enough that the muscles had learned to compensate. She'd been with Ross for seven years. Seven years built its own kind of gravity.
"Ross," she said, quietly.
Something happened in Ross's face. The collapsed quality of it shifted. A person reappearing.
"Are you finally—" His voice came out unsteady. He cleared it. "Can we talk?"
Carol looked at Andrew briefly. He made a small neutral gesture that he hoped communicated don't factor me in.
"When we get home," Carol said. She took Ross's arm.
Ross nodded with the whole-body relief of someone who'd been holding on a long time and had just been told they could let go for a minute. He didn't have it in him to play it cool and Andrew respected that, actually.
Carol glanced back at Andrew as they turned to go. "Sorry you ended up in the middle of this."
"You're not in my way," he said. And then, because it seemed like the right moment, even if she might not be ready for it: "Carol. Whatever you decide — Ross is going to be okay. He just needs to know where the ground is."
She paused.
She didn't respond, but he could see her absorbing it. She was smart — she'd been absorbing things for months and not acting on them, which was its own kind of answer. The situation would resolve itself when it resolved itself. Andrew had no business accelerating it, and he hadn't tried to. He'd just said a thing that was true.
He watched them walk away, Ross's posture already incrementally better just from the arm contact, and felt the mild ache of watching people you cared about carry things you couldn't carry for them.
Then he went to get coffee.
Central Perk was doing its usual midmorning business when he arrived. Chandler was on the couch with a coffee and the expression of a man avoiding something work-related.
"You look contemplative," Chandler said.
"Ran into Ross."
"How is he?"
"He's Ross." Andrew took the armchair. "He's surviving."
Gunther was behind the counter, doing the particular thing he did where he appeared to be busy with something but was actually tracking Rachel's movements. Rachel wasn't in yet. This happened every shift.
The new girl — Lily, who'd been filling in for the past few weeks — was working the counter. She had a face that customers found instinctively trustworthy, which was mostly a benefit, except that it had given her significant latitude to get orders wrong without consequence, and she was quietly taking advantage of it.
She brought Andrew a coffee.
He looked at it.
"Lily."
She stopped.
"This is a cappuccino."
"You ordered a cappuccino."
"I ordered a flat white."
A moment passed. She took the cup back with the smooth efficiency of someone who had done this before and would do it again.
Chandler watched this with interest. "You're hard on her."
"She's capable of getting it right. She just doesn't have to yet." Andrew leaned back. "She'll have to eventually."
"There's a whole philosophy in that sentence that I'm choosing not to engage with before noon." Chandler drank his coffee. "So you and Susan—"
"Not like that."
"I didn't say anything."
"Your face said something."
Chandler's face declined to confirm or deny this.
Andrew was going to say more when the door opened, and he knew who it was before he finished turning his head. He didn't know how he knew — some combination of something in his peripheral vision, the way the room's ambient attention slightly redistributed itself. He'd been getting better at reading rooms.
Robert.
He came in without apparent urgency. Scanned the space in under a second — not obviously, just a person taking in a new room, except the scan was too systematic, corner to corner. He chose a seat that had sightlines to the entire floor and none of the blind spots. He called Lily over, ordered something, and settled into the performance of a man with nowhere to be.
His gaze moved across the room twice. Both times it landed on Andrew for less than two seconds before moving on.
[Observation (Proficient): 44/100]
The panel ticked up slightly, which meant Andrew was reading the room correctly.
"—you even listening?" Chandler was saying.
"Sorry." Andrew stood. "I have to take care of something. I'll catch you later."
He left at a pace that was normal. Not hurried. He'd learned from watching Robert at the restaurant that urgency communicated information, and he had nothing to communicate.
Outside, half a block away, he stopped and let himself think.
Robert had looked at him twice. Had chosen the seat that let him watch the room. Had shown up at a coffee shop that Andrew visited most mornings, three days after Andrew had caught him being watched at a restaurant.
That was either coincidence or it wasn't.
Forty minutes later he was at Mr. Corleone's door.
He'd thought about it on the walk over and decided that the fastest path to reliable information was the person most likely to have it, and that was this man. He owed Andrew nothing, but Andrew had been careful and respectful in their brief acquaintance, and sometimes that was worth something.
Corleone opened the door, took in Andrew's expression, and stepped back to let him in without asking why he was there.
Andrew told him what he'd seen. The restaurant, three nights ago. The exchange with Susan. Robert's eyes, and the specific quality of his attention. And then this morning, Central Perk, the systematic scan, the calculated seat.
"He clocked me at the restaurant," Andrew said. "I don't know why I was worth clocking. But something registered."
Corleone was quiet for a moment.
"His name," he said, "is Robert Durst."
Andrew went still.
The name surfaced from somewhere — not immediately, and then all at once. Robert Durst. money. The Durst real estate family, Manhattan, the kind of wealth that had been institutional long enough to develop its own gravity. And alongside the name, other things: a wife who disappeared in 1982, never found. A friend shot in her home in Los Angeles. A neighbor in Galveston, dismembered, found in Galveston Bay. Three times in proximity to violent death. Three times not convicted.
He wasn't a rumor. He was a documented pattern.
"He's been dealt with before," Corleone said. The phrasing was careful. "He'll be dealt with again." He looked at Andrew with the assessing eyes of a man who had spent a long career reading people. "You have good instincts, Mr. Sanchez. The fact that you came here rather than waiting to see what happened — that's the right call."
"I appreciate you telling me."
"For Lily's sake." Corleone said it simply, not like a favor being extended, just a statement of why this particular situation warranted his attention. He meant the girl behind the counter, Andrew realized — Lily, who was adjacent to Andrew, who was adjacent to all of this without having chosen to be.
Andrew nodded and stood.
"I'll let you know if he surfaces again," Andrew said.
"Do that."
He walked home through the park, taking the long route, letting himself think. The boxing permit was processing. The gun license application was drafted. The voice recorder had arrived yesterday, still in its packaging on his counter.
He needed to stop treating preparation as a project he was getting to and start treating it as something already in progress.
He was almost to his block when his phone buzzed in his pocket.
A text from Susan: Bolton wants to move your Thursday session to 8am. You good?
He typed back: Fine.
She sent back a thumbs up. No further commentary.
He smiled briefly and put the phone away.
[Goal Tracker]
PS 500 → 1 Bonus Chapter
Reviews 10 → 1 Bonus Chapter
If you enjoyed it, consider a review.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters