The Shape of Her Absence

He goes to the flat on day four.

Four days of telling himself she is processing the Vienna information, that she retreats into work when she's thinking through something large, that the not-answering-the-phone is nothing more than the independence he has always admired in her. Four days of two unanswered calls and one message that sits on read. On the fourth day he goes to the flat.

The landlord answers the door to the tenement. He has the expression of a man who has recently processed a standard lease termination and is not entirely clear why he's being asked about it by a large person who didn't ring ahead. Vacated. Month's notice given. She cleaned the place herself.

He stands on the Canongate pavement afterwards and assembles what this means. A month's notice means she decided at least a month ago. She was standing on Arthurs Seat with him in October wind and had already decided. She was sitting across from him at dinner three weeks ago, laughing at something he said, and had already decided. She said goodnight at the corner and meant it as something more final than it sounded, and he didn't hear the finality, and she must have known he wouldn't hear it, and she said it anyway.

He goes to the restaurant. Fiona is clearing a table near the door. She sees him coming and her expression does something complicated and she says Veira hasn't been in before he asks. Three Sundays. Her table is still reserved. I won't take it off until she asks me to.

He stands outside in the cold and looks at the reserved corner table through the window. Four years of Sundays. He thinks about the intelligence report in his desk drawer, the six months of it sitting there while he found reasons to wait for a better moment. He thinks about better moment and what that actually means and arrives, standing on the Canongate in the November dark, at the uncomfortable conclusion that it means the moment where telling her was most comfortable for him.

His phone rings. Emre. He answers.

"She's gone," Sebastien says.

A pause. The kind that contains a decision already made. "I know."

"How long have you known."

"Since Tuesday."

"Four days."

"Yes."

The silence between them has weight. Sebastien says: "You need to start telling us things. Whatever you know about her, whatever the source, you need to start telling us. We are running out of time."

Emre says there are things he needs to tell all of them together, things he should have said considerably sooner. He'll be at the council room in an hour.

Sebastien ends the call.

He stands on the Canongate looking at the reserved table and thinking about the pack bond, which is smoke and silence and thirty-one outlines with nothing inside them, and thinking about six months of a report in a drawer, and thinking about what it means to protect someone from information that was theirs to have.

He put the report in the drawer because he was afraid of what she'd wonder about him. He called this protection. It wasn't protection. It was the specific cowardice of a man who wanted to keep something good without earning it.

He walks back through the Old Town. He goes upstairs past the council room, past the office, and takes the stairs to the top floor and stands at the window looking out at Edinburgh doing its permanent thing.

He thinks: she's not lost. She's somewhere specific, doing something specific, and she left because every person in her orbit made the same mistake treating her like a situation to be managed and not a person to be known.

He picks up his phone. He composes one message to a number he has, a number associated with the anonymous text about the Borders coast from weeks ago. He types: I'm ready to be honest with you. Whenever you're ready to hear it.

He puts the phone face down on the desk.

He waits.