Chapter 54: The Second Visitor
Breakfast passed the way it usually did.
The television murmured softly in the corner while sunlight spilled across the old dining table.
Elana moved between the stove and the sink with the quiet efficiency of someone who had repeated the same routine for years, setting another piece of toast onto Liam’s plate before sitting down opposite him.
"How’s work?" she asked.
"The usual."They still making you close every other night?Sometimes.
She clicked her tongue. "You’re the youngest one there. They always give the youngest the worst shifts."
Liam only smiled and reached for his coffee.he can’t tell his mom about his cafe not now he wants to wait till he starts getting his monthly money before he tells his mom.
She watched him over the rim of her own mug. "You’ve been looking tired lately."
"I’ve just been busy.""Busy doing what?"
He met her eyes for a heartbeat before looking back at his breakfast. "A little of everything."
Elana didn’t press. She never had. Some questions, she’d learned, only pushed people further away.
Instead, she reached across the table and brushed an invisible crumb from his sleeve, a habit she’d never quite grown out of.
"Just don’t forget to take care of yourself."
"I won’t."
A few minutes later, Liam carried his plate to the sink, rinsed it clean, and set it on the drying rack. Upstairs, tucked inside the notebook on his desk, two questions were still waiting for him.
Why do you keep changing employers?
Who’s actually paying you?
He still didn’t have an answer. Only an address, folded neatly inside his jacket pocket.
Addresses, Liam had learned, were honest in ways people rarely were.
As he slipped on his shoes by the front door, Elana looked up from drying the last plate.
"Going somewhere?"
"I’ve got a few errands."What kind of errands?
He shrugged, keeping his tone casual. "Bank. A bit of paperwork."
She studied him for a quiet moment. Not suspiciously just carefully. It was the same look she’d worn years ago whenever he’d come home insisting he hadn’t been the one who’d broken a window or started a fight at school. Back then, she had always known.
Now, she simply smiled."Don’t be late for work."I won’t.He stepped outside before the lie had a chance to linger between them.
The morning air was cool.
He slipped one hand into his jacket pocket, his fingers brushing the folded sheet of paper. The address was still there. Waiting.
So were the answers. He just had to find them.
The address had brought him to the eastern side of the city, where glass office towers gradually gave way to older commercial blocks.
The sidewalks were quieter here, lined with warehouses, small accounting firms, freight brokers, and businesses whose names meant nothing to anyone passing by.
Delivery trucks idled at odd angles outside loading docks, and the air smelled faintly of diesel and cardboard. Nothing about the neighborhood invited attention.
He crossed the street and stopped outside a five-story brick building that time hadn’t been kind to. Paint had peeled away from the window frames, rust streaked the old fire escape, and even the tenant directory by the entrance had yellowed under years of sun.
He scanned the listings an insurance office, an import agency, a tax firm, a shipping broker, a property manager. No Eastbridge Logistics. No Harper Linguistics.He wasn’t surprised. Public records rarely kept pace with reality.
Inside, the lobby was nearly silent, the kind of hush that came from a building with more empty offices than full ones. An elderly receptionist looked up from a crossword as the glass door swung shut behind him.
"Morning."
"Morning." Her eyes lingered on him a second longer than necessary. "You look lost."
"I hope not. I’m trying to find a company that used to rent an office here Eastbridge Logistics."
Recognition flickered across her face. "They brought deliveries up to the fourth floor for a while." She reached beneath the desk and pulled out a thick binder, its edges curling with age. "Management keeps everything." She flipped through it until her finger stopped on a page. "Suite 406. Lease terminated."
"What happened to them?"
"They stopped answering calls, far as I remember. Then the rent checks stopped coming. Building management gave it a couple months before they finally changed the locks." She shrugged. "Wasn’t dramatic. Just quiet. That’s usually how it goes with tenants like that no scene, no argument. They just stop being there."
"No one came to clear the office out?"Someone must have, eventually. By the time I noticed, it was already empty. Chairs, desks, everything gone before I thought to ask about it."
"What about the people who worked there?"There weren’t many. Three, maybe four." She thought for a moment, tapping a finger against the binder. "Though there was one gentleman who wasn’t on staff used to visit, maybe once a month.
He’d arrive, go upstairs, stay ten or fifteen minutes, and leave. Always alone. Always carrying the same leather briefcase. Expensive suits, very polite, never smiled."
"What did he look like?"
"Tall. Dark hair. Sharp features I remember thinking he looked more like a lawyer than a businessman. The kind of face you’d forget in a crowd, if you weren’t paying attention."
Liam reached into his pocket, unfolded the newspaper clipping, and turned it toward her. "This man?"
She adjusted her glasses and her eyes widened almost immediately. "Yes. That’s him. I’d know that suit anywhere."
For the first time since leaving the house that morning, something clicked into place not an answer, just a confirmation that he was looking in the right direction.
Liam thanked her and stepped back outside, the afternoon breeze stirring the clipping in his hand as he glanced up at the fourth-floor windows, dust coating the glass from the inside, the blinds behind it pulled halfway and frozen there, as though whoever left last hadn’t bothered to finish the job.
He didn’t head straight for the bus stop. Instead he crossed into a small convenience store, bought a pack of gum from a cashier who never looked up from his phone, and leaned against the storefront outside, unwrapping it slowly while his eyes drifted back toward the old building.
Ten minutes passed uneventfully a courier wheeling boxes through the entrance, an accountant hurrying out on a call, an elderly couple bickering quietly about parking, a delivery van double-parked long enough to draw one honk before it pulled away.
The store owner stepped out to sweep the sidewalk, glancing over at him with the mild curiosity of a man who noticed everyone who lingered too long near his shop.
"You waiting for somebody?"Just resting my feet.The old man laughed, leaning on the broom. "You’re the second person this week to say that.
Young fellow, glasses, camera around his neck spent nearly an hour just standing where you’re standing. I figured he was casing the place until I realized he wasn’t even looking at my store."When was that?
"Monday." The owner paused mid-sweep, scratching at his jaw. "Funny thing, though."
"What’s that?"He came back.Liam looked up. Yesterday?
"No." The old man shook his head, almost amused by his own memory. "This morning. Before you got here. Stood right about where you’re standing now, actually, for maybe twenty minutes, then just walked off toward the bus stop like nothing happened."
Liam said nothing for a moment, turning that over carefully. Someone else wasn’t just curious about this building someone else was still watching it, closely enough to return within a day of their last visit, on a schedule regular enough that a shopkeeper had noticed the pattern without even trying to. That wasn’t idle curiosity. That was a routine, and routines meant purpose.
"He say anything to you? Ask about the building?"
"Not to me. Bought a coffee once, didn’t say much beyond thanks." The owner shrugged, already losing interest, going back to his sweeping.
Figured he was a reporter, or maybe one of those insurance men. This block gets them sometimes, after the redevelopment talk started.
Liam thanked him, bought a bottle of water he didn’t need, and started walking, in no hurry, letting the new piece settle in alongside everything else he’d learned that morning.
People had a habit of becoming invisible the moment they stopped acting like they were watching, he thought and whoever the man with the camera was, he had just stopped being invisible, whether he realized it or not.
Liam pulled his notebook out one last time before the bus arrived and looked at what he’d written that morning two names, circled, connected by a single line, and beneath them now, a third notation: *someone else is watching this building. regularly.*
He closed the notebook without adding anything more."You made one mistake," he said quietly, to no one.
He slipped the notebook back into his jacket, the folded clipping resting against it like it had always belonged there.You left someone behind to watch the mess.