Chapter 9: Eleanor's Announcement — The Marriage

The call came at 6:47 in the morning, which was how Daniel knew it was serious before he even looked at the screen.

Horatio did not call before seven. It was an unspoken arrangement between them, one of those behavioral contracts formed gradually through enough years of proximity that neither had ever needed to state it. Horatio called at reasonable hours. He texted if it could wait. He knocked if it was urgent. He called before seven only once before, and that had been the morning Daniel's father's motorcade had taken a turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue and someone had been waiting.

Daniel's phone was face-down on the desk beside three open legal pads and the remnants of what had been, three hours ago, a cup of coffee. He had not slept. He had been working through a supplemental financial disclosure he'd obtained via a Freedom of Information request filed under a name that was not his, tracing a subsidiary wire transfer that kept dissolving into legitimate-looking infrastructure every time he got close enough to touch it. The phone buzzed once against the wood. He turned it over.