Obsession

The clock above the espresso machine read seven-twelve when Iris took her seat, though she hardly needed the confirmation. Her body had already told her, some internal metronome ticking down the minutes, the way a held breath knows exactly when it must break.

She chose the same corner table every morning—second from the window, half-shadowed by the hanging ferns the owner never bothered to trim, close enough to see but far enough to disappear. The chair's wicker back had molded itself to her spine over the months, or perhaps she'd simply molded herself to it. Either way, she fit here. She fit here the way she fit nowhere else.

The americano in front of her had gone lukewarm, a skin forming faintly on its surface, but she didn't call the barista over for a fresh one. Three dollars and change bought her a window of time, not a beverage, and she'd learned to treat the coffee as a prop rather than a pleasure. She wrapped both hands around the cup anyway, more from habit than cold.

Seven-fourteen.

The bell above the door gave its small brass shiver, and Iris's pulse did the same.

Maya Reyes stepped through in the rust-colored coat—the one with the top button missing, the one she…

The gallery smelled like fresh paint and old money—a combination Maya had come to find almost comforting, in the way a familiar ache becomes comforting once you stop expecting it to leave. She arrived at Bellweather Contemporary at nine, forty minutes before opening, and let herself in through the side door with the key Dana had given her eight months ago, back when the gallery had still felt like an opportunity rather than a holding pattern.

The main room stretched long and white, track lighting humming faintly overhead, and the current show—a collection of oversized abstracts by an artist named Corinne Albrecht, whose canvases Maya privately considered derivative of better painters dead thirty years—hung in careful, expensive silence along both walls. Maya moved through the space with a watering can in one hand, tending to the single fiddle-leaf fig that Dana insisted gave the gallery "warmth," though Maya suspected what it actually gave the gallery was something to dust around.

"You're here early," Dana said, emerging from the back office with a travel mug and the harried look of a woman who'd been arguing with a shipping company since seven. Dana owned Bellweather outright,…

The café sat diagonally across from Bellweather, close enough that its window seats offered an unobstructed view of the gallery's front door, which was, of course, precisely why Iris had chosen it three weeks ago as her preferred outpost. She'd learned the rhythms of this corner the way other people learned the rhythms of a lover's breathing—the barista's smoke breaks at ten and two, the stretch of sidewalk that caught full sun until noon before sliding into shadow, the particular Thursday pattern of Maya's comings and goings, gallery mornings bleeding into mural afternoons three blocks north.

She'd told herself, ordering her coffee that morning, that she wasn't here to watch. She was here because the espresso was good and the window seat was available and a woman was allowed to drink coffee near a gallery without it constituting a federal case. The lie slid down easier than she expected, the way most of her lies had begun to lately, oiled smooth by repetition.

At 12:51, Maya emerged from Bellweather's side door, phone pressed to her ear, her tote bag swinging loose against her hip, and started up the block in the unhurried, long-limbed stride Iris had memorized from a hundred…