Part Six: Richard
He was standing near the door.
Not leaving. Not approaching. Standing in the particular position of someone who had done what they came to do and was now uncertain what came next.
Richard Strand — forty-one years old, founder of a logistics company that operated in six countries, a man who had spent two decades building things and knowing what they were worth and knowing what he was worth and moving through the world with the specific confidence that competence and capital together produced — looked at this boy in the overlarge jacket.
He had noticed him when he came in. He had been in the process of deciding whether to have someone remove him when Dr. Halvorsen had said wait, and he had waited, because Dr. Halvorsen had a quality that made you wait, and then the boy had pointed at the location on Sofia’s neck, and then the scope had gone where the boy pointed, and then the thing had been removed.
He stood with this.
He had built two companies from nothing. He had made decisions in crisis that had saved those companies. He knew the feeling of seeing something others missed — he had built a career partly on that feeling, and he valued it above most things, and he recognized it when he saw it in other people.
He crossed the room.
He stood in front of Leo.
“How did you know?” he said.
Leo looked at him. He had the direct gaze of someone who had never had the option of looking indirectly, for whom eye contact was a form of information-gathering as much as anything else.
“I just noticed,” he said. “I notice things.”
“Where are your parents?”
A pause. “My grandfather. He’s — he’s not nearby right now.”
Richard understood the pause and what it contained. He looked at the boy for a long moment — the boots, the jacket, the specific kind of watchfulness in the face of someone who had been taking care of themselves for longer than should have been necessary.
“Sofia,” he said. “Her name is Sofia. My daughter.”
Leo nodded.
“Thank you,” Richard said. He said it simply, without the inflation that gratitude sometimes acquired in these situations, the way it became a performance of the feeling rather than the feeling. He said it like a fact. Thank you. Your action produced my daughter’s continued existence. Thank you.
Leo nodded again.
“Are you hungry?” Richard said.
