My father said a name in his sleep.
He was on my couch at forty-two stories — the couch Cole and I had sat against during the blizzard, the floor where the Neruda had slid off his knee. I'd brought my father here because Mares had walked into Treeline that afternoon and ordered a cortado and sat at the corner table — Cole's table — and looked at me across twelve hundred square feet of reclaimed wood with the patient, professional calm of a man who'd been planning this conversation for months.
The Mares meeting had lasted eleven minutes. He'd been polite. Measured. He'd told me the historical filings couldn't be erased. He'd told me Roe's interests in the corridor predated Cole's. He'd told me that cooperation was always preferable to litigation. And then he'd finished his cortado — he'd actually finished it, every drop, because the man who was trying to dismantle my life had the decency to appreciate my coffee — and left.
