Fake it with me
He read it again.
He typed back immediately: *Who is this?*
Three dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
And then the response arrived and Mason Reed, who had spent three years building a reputation on being the person that nothing stuck to, felt something stick, felt it land with the specific, unignorable weight of information that changed the shape of everything around it, because the name in the response was one he recognized, and the reason it changed the shape of everything was not because it was unexpected.