Nate went straight for the bar cart in the corner without being asked. He poured fast, no wasted motion, four drinks built in the time it took the others to sit down. He left the fifth glass empty in front of Arianne, water instead, no comment attached to the choice.
Franz took the seat beside her. Gilbert and Julian took the two across, and nobody spoke right away, the day finally catching up to all four of them at once now that there was nowhere left to be.
"Someone start," Nate said, dropping into the last chair with his own glass.
Julian went first, laying out the shape of the afternoon the way he’d have briefed a client, clean and chronological. The panel. The swarm afterward. Franz walking in and pulling the room off Arianne. None of it news to the two people who’d lived it, but Nate needed the frame before the details meant anything.
"There’s a piece missing," Arianne said, once Julian finished. "Before the session. Rafael cornered me in the side corridor."
Franz’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth. He set it down without drinking.
"He picked his moment well," Arianne said. "Gilbert and Julian were both close to me all day. He would have known that. He waited for the six minutes I was alone, and he made sure it looked like an accident even though it wasn’t one."
"What did he want?" Franz’s voice had gone very even, the way it did when even was the only option left.
"To catch up. His words." Arianne turned her glass a quarter turn without drinking from it either. "I told him no."
Gilbert’s jaw had set hard enough to see from across the table. He didn’t say anything about it. He turned to Nate instead. "Is it true you and Arianne already tried to sort the forum’s attendee list before any of us knew Howard might be there?"
"It’s true." Nate didn’t dress it up. "I raised it with her three days ago. Given what we know about him, we figured we’d recognize him in a crowd if he came looking for her himself. Low odds. Worth naming anyway."
He looked at Arianne. "You sent me the list of everyone who approached you the second you were in the car. I started before I got here."
Arianne nodded once, confirming it rather than explaining it.
Nate reached into the bag at his feet and pulled out five folders, setting them on the coffee table in a stack that wasn’t quite square. Gilbert leaned forward first, opening the top one, then the next, then the next, recognizing every name before Nate said a word about any of them.
"Age, existing connections, and the networks they run in," Nate said. "Those five cleared at least one of the criteria that fit Howard’s profile. All five also had a connection to Alex, in some form, while he was alive."
Franz’s jaw hardened. He didn’t reach for the folders.
"So we finally get a name and a face." Julian said it slower than he meant to, like the sentence needed testing before he trusted it. "After all this time."
"We get five names and five faces," Nate said. "One of them, maybe."
"I’ll take five over none." Gilbert closed the folder in his hands and set it flat on the stack. "Leave the rest to me. I’ll run all five past the PI, see if any of the backgrounds line up with what we already have on Howard. Age, timeline, the gaps in the records. If one of them’s carrying a hole where his history should be, we’ll find it."
"How long," Franz said.
"Days, not weeks. He’s already got half the framework built from the visitor logs." Gilbert stacked the folders back into a neat pile, squaring the edges the way he squared most things once a decision had been made. "I’ll call him tonight. He works faster when it’s late and there’s a reason for it."
"Make sure he knows what he’s looking for," Nate said. "Not just a name. A hole. Somewhere in a record that should be continuous and isn’t."
"He knows how to find a hole." Gilbert said it without pride, just fact.
Julian looked at Arianne across the table. "What’s the plan. Yours, I mean. Not the PI’s."
"I don’t have one yet." She said it plainly, no performance in it either way. "Not a real one. Not until we know which of these five is actually him, if any of them are." She glanced toward the bassinet in the corner, where Lexx hadn’t stirred through any of it. "My priority right now is the children and Franz. Everything else waits behind that."
"You think he’d move on the kids." Gilbert’s voice had lost its earlier register entirely.
"I don’t think anything yet. That’s the point. Until I do, I’d rather all of you be careful in ways that feel excessive than careful in ways that feel reasonable." She looked between the three of them. "Watch the school pickups. Watch who calls the house line. Watch everything that used to be routine, because routine is exactly what he’s spent thirty years learning how to use."
Nobody argued with that. Gilbert reached for his drink and didn’t finish it. Julian sat back, arms crossed, eyes on the folders like they might rearrange themselves into an answer if he stared long enough. Nate had already started clearing the glasses, giving his hands something to do while the rest of them sat with what had just been said.
Franz was the only one who didn’t move at all. He was looking at the bassinet, at Lexx’s small chest rising and falling under the blanket, and whatever he was thinking, he didn’t say it out loud. Upstairs, muffled through the ceiling, one of the twins laughed at something Kyle said, and the sound didn’t reach the sitting room so much as remind everyone in it that the house had a floor above this conversation, going about its ordinary business without any of them.