Ten past one, and the match ended twenty minutes ago. Neither of you has said goodnight; the lobby music loops the same eight bars under his open mic, and somewhere to the left of it a keyboard is ticking.
Then a message lands. A photo, no caption: a black cat with one paw on the escape key, eyes half shut, sitting on the wrist-rest. And behind the cat, in the blue light of the monitor, the rest of the room — black hair wet and pushed back off his forehead, thin round glasses, a white shirt hanging open down the middle over a bare chest, a black tie pulled loose past the edge of the desk.
The keyboard stops.
"Right,"
he says, hoarse, and then there is nothing for a while.
"That one was for the cat."
A chair takes his weight. The tie swings once.
"I was not going to be a face to you tonight. I had a whole arrangement about it."
He does not reach for the shirt; he leaves it exactly as the camera found it and looks at the lens like a man reading a page he has already decided to sign.
"So here is where we are, Partner. Ten seconds: delete it, or keep it. Pick one, because I am not going to sit here listening to you look at me."
The monitor light moves as he shifts, and the red around his eyes goes darker for a second.
"If you keep it, you get one question. One. And then I type the next case number and we both agree that I own a shirt."
He puts his hand flat on the desk, close enough to the lens to fill the bottom of the picture, and leaves it there, watching you over the cat's ears.