A Safehouse for Two Enemies

How it begins

The wedding cake appeared while they were checking the windows.

Daria had left the ballroom empty.

Now three white tiers stood on the head table beneath a pair of sugar figures wearing clothes she and Evan had worn the day the witness disappeared.

Evan saw the figures and stopped.

"Did you tell them?"

"No."

"Who else knew?"

"You printed half of it."

"And you removed the rest."

The argument was familiar enough to feel almost safe.

Daria disliked that most of all.

They had arrived at the venue in separate cars, under names selected by people who claimed no connection to either of them. A married couple waiting for renovation work. Two weeks. No visitors. No calls to anyone who knew their faces.

The building had been closed for four years.

Dust lay on every table except this one.

Evan moved closer to the cake without touching it. He had become thinner since the hearings. It was an inconvenient thing to notice about someone whose name still made her former colleagues lower their voices.

"The tie," he said.

She looked.

The sugar man wore a green tie.

Evan had worn blue.

The green one belonged to the witness.

Under the cake knife lay a folded card.

For the happy couple, whose story begins where someone else's ended.

Daria checked the service door.

Locked from inside.

Above them, an old speaker crackled.

A woman's voice began the opening words of a marriage ceremony, calm and professional, as though the room contained chairs full of relatives.

Evan looked toward the ceiling.

Daria had once been able to make any statement sound harmless by removing the right sentence. She knew the voice before it reached the end of the first paragraph.

It was a recording of the witness.

Not the testimony they had used.

The rest of it.

Evan put his notebook on the table between them.

For the first time, neither tried to move it to their own side.