Chapter Five: Morning Without Answers

Saturday arrived without ceremony.

Daniel woke at six regardless, because his body had long since stopped waiting for permission. He lay in the grey morning light for a moment, cataloguing the day ahead the way he always did — a habit that had become so automatic it was less a practice than a reflex, his mind already sorting and scheduling before he was fully conscious. He had no client meetings on weekends. He had grocery shopping, which he did on Saturday mornings to beat the midday crowd. He had laundry, and a brief he'd brought home that he'd been meaning to annotate since Thursday, and the dry-cleaning he'd been collecting receipts for and forgetting to retrieve for two weeks running.

It was a full enough day. A structured enough day.

He lay there and thought about Adrian Williams.

This was becoming a pattern, and he resented it. He was not the sort of person who thought about near-strangers first thing in the morning. He was the sort of person who thought about case notes and protein intake and whether the dry-cleaner on Fenwick closed at five or six. The fact that a man he had met four days ago was taking up residence in his thoughts before he'd even made coffee felt like a small personal failing — not catastrophic, but the kind of thing he would have noted in someone else with mild concern.

He got up. He made coffee. He stood at the counter and drank it in the particular silence of a Saturday morning, which was a different quality of silence to weekday mornings — less purposeful, more exposed. On weekdays the silence had somewhere to go. On Saturdays it simply sat with him.

He thought about someone who wanted me to be somewhere specific.

He thought about it the way he thought about a clause in a contract that didn't quite fit the surrounding language — not alarming on its face, but inconsistent with the rest of the document in a way that suggested something had been added later, or revised, or was doing more work than it appeared to be. Adrian had said it plainly, without inflection, the way you stated facts that didn't require emphasis because they were simply true. He hadn't offered context. He hadn't indicated whether the someone was a person, a circumstance, an obligation. He had offered the information and then moved past it so smoothly that Daniel had been several steps further down the pavement before he'd registered its weight.

That was the thing about Adrian's technique, he was beginning to understand. It wasn't sleight of hand exactly — it wasn't that he concealed things so much as that he offered them in a register that made them feel smaller than they were. By the time Daniel's mind caught up, the moment had passed, and asking about it would have required doubling back in a way that felt effortful and slightly desperate.

He was not going to double back. He was going to go to the grocery store.

The grocery store was four blocks from his building and opened at seven, which was why Daniel had always liked it. He went in with his list — actual list, written in his phone's notes app under the heading Saturday, subcategorised by aisle — and moved through it with the brisk efficiency of someone who found supermarkets mildly hostile environments and wanted to spend as little time in them as possible.

Produce first, then dairy, then the middle aisles which he navigated without lingering because lingering in middle aisles led to buying things he didn't need and wouldn't use and would eventually throw away with the specific guilt of wasted intention.

He was in the cereal aisle, reaching for the same box he'd bought every Saturday for the last three years, when someone stopped beside him and said, "The one next to it is better."

Daniel turned.

A woman in her mid-thirties, red coat, dark hair pulled back, was pointing at the shelf with her basket hanging from the crook of her elbow. She was looking at the cereal boxes with the considering expression of a person who had strong opinions about breakfast.

"The oat clusters," she said. "More flavour, same calories. I switched about a year ago and I haven't looked back."

Daniel looked at the box she was indicating. He looked at his own box.

"I prefer consistency," he said.

She glanced at him with the particular amusement of someone who had expected that exact answer. "Of course you do," she said, not unkindly, and moved on down the aisle.

Daniel put his box in the basket.

He stood for a moment and then, with the distinct sensation of making a small and insignificant concession to the universe, took it back out and replaced it with the oat clusters.

He was not thinking about Adrian Williams. He was making a completely independent decision about cereal.

He finished his shopping, paid, and walked home in the thin Saturday morning sunshine, which had broken through the cloud cover with what felt like mild surprise at its own appearance. The street was quiet at this hour — dog walkers, the occasional runner, a man outside the hardware store two blocks down sorting a delivery of paint cans with the unhurried focus of someone at peace with his Saturday.

Daniel walked and let his mind do what it did on unstructured mornings, which was run in loose, unguided circles rather than the directed lines of the working week. Usually these circles produced something useful — a case angle he hadn't considered, a scheduling solution, a reminder of something undone. This morning they kept arriving at the same point.

Not yet.

Two words. He had turned them over so many times in the last two days that they'd become smooth, offering fewer surfaces to grip. But the meaning held. Not yet was a temporal statement — it implied a future state that was anticipated, already accounted for. Not yet was what you said when you knew the answer was coming, when you'd already factored in its arrival, when the only remaining variable was timing.

Adrian had said it about knowing him.

As if knowing Daniel were an event on a calendar. Something scheduled.

He let himself into his building and took the stairs instead of the lift — he sometimes did this on weekends, when there was no reason not to — and was on the fifth floor landing when he heard his phone buzz in the grocery bag.

He stopped. Set the bag down on the step. Took out his phone.

It was a message from a number he didn't recognise.

The oat clusters are better. I wasn't lying.

Daniel stared at it.

He read it again, in case he had misread it the first time. He had not misread it.

The cereal. The woman in the red coat. The comment he had not imagined could possibly have any connection to anything, in the cereal aisle of a grocery store at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, on a street he had lived on for four years, in a shop he visited every week like clockwork.

His thumb moved before his thoughts caught up.

How do you have this number?

The reply came in under a minute.

You gave it to me. Wednesday night, before you got out of the car.

Daniel leaned against the stairwell wall and tried to remember Wednesday night with forensic precision. He had gotten into the car. They had driven. He had got out. He had not — he was almost certain, and then slightly less certain, and then uncertain in the specific way he hated — given his number to anyone. He hadn't had his phone out. He didn't give his personal number to people he didn't know. It was one of the rules, the practical ones, so automatic he wouldn't have broken it without noticing.

He thought about Wednesday night.

He thought about the moment he'd stepped out of the car, the cold air and the rain and the tail lights pulling away into the traffic. He had been unsettled. He had been managing something he didn't have a name for. He had not — surely — handed over his phone number in those twenty minutes without retaining any memory of it.

He typed: I don't remember doing that.

Three dots appeared, then:

You were distracted.

Then, after a beat:

How's the headache?

Daniel looked at his phone for a long time.

He had not mentioned a headache. Not on Friday, not in the restaurant, not on the walk home. He had managed it quietly, the way he managed most things — internally, invisibly, without making it anyone else's business. There was no way for Adrian to know about the headache unless he had noticed it, and the only way to notice a headache in someone else was to be watching closely enough to catch the particular quality of tension around the eyes and jaw, the slight flatness in the voice, the way a person moved when they were maintaining normality through mild pain.

The kind of attention that required either professional training or something more personal.

He put his phone in his pocket. He picked up the grocery bag. He climbed the remaining four flights of stairs with his jaw set and his thoughts moving in fast, clipped lines, and let himself into his apartment, and put the groceries away with more force than was strictly necessary.

Then he sat at his kitchen counter and took his phone back out and looked at the last message again.

How's the headache?

There was a version of this that was explainable. There was a version in which he had, in a moment of uncharacteristic distraction, given his number to a stranger in a car, and simply failed to retain the memory. There was a version in which a perceptive person had noticed he was unwell and was following up with reasonable concern, the way a person who paid attention to people sometimes did.

He was running out of reasons to find these versions convincing.

He opened a new message.

Better, he typed. Don't text this number again.

He sent it, put his phone face-down on the counter, and started annotating the brief.

He turned the phone over four minutes later to check if there had been a reply.

There wasn't. And he didn't know, sitting alone in his Saturday apartment with his oat clusters in the cupboard and his brief half-annotated on the counter, whether the silence was a relief or the most unsettling thing yet.

End of Chapter Five