Chapter Ten
Matt drove toward Meriden with the windows cracked, the air cool enough to keep him alert. The radio stayed off. He didn’t need noise competing with the shape forming in his head.
Religion wasn’t his language. Belief wasn’t something he could improvise around. He understood behavior, systems, pressure—but ritual followed rules you couldn’t see unless you knew where to look. That made him careful.
He called Carissa as the road narrowed.
“I need just enough not to screw this up,” he said when she answered.
“About the mosque,” she said.
“Yes. How to behave. And Islam in general. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I’ll keep it simple,” Carissa replied. “What not to do matters more than what to do. Don’t lead. Don’t correct. Don’t perform belief you don’t have. Presence is enough.”
“I can manage that.”
“Let silence work for you,” she added. “People talk when they think they’re not being evaluated.”
She didn’t treat his ignorance as weakness—only as a variable to account for. When the call ended, Matt felt marginally better equipped, which was all he ever expected.
Kyle’s place sat on a quiet street that hadn’t changed much. Matt parked, took a moment, then knocked.
Kyle answered cautiously, then relaxed when he saw who it was.
“Matt,” he said. “Didn’t expect this.”
“Neither did I,” Matt replied. “Thanks for being open to it.”
Kyle stepped aside without comment.
Inside, the apartment was clean and spare. Shoes by the door. A folded prayer mat against the wall. No television on. Whatever noise the world was making stayed outside.
They talked briefly. Safely. Enough to bridge the years without reopening them. Matt kept it simple—work, travel, passing through. Kyle didn’t press. He never had.
When Matt mentioned the mosque, Kyle nodded once.
“Tonight’s fine,” he said. “It’s quieter during the week.”
Matt accepted that without comment.
They left together.
—
Carissa closed Matt’s active file and opened another—one she rarely touched now.
Theodore Symbiac.
They had crossed paths years earlier at a university known for producing people who disappeared into systems quietly and permanently. Computer science. Mathematics. Network theory. Talent that fed directly into places that didn’t advertise.
Ted had the technical reach Carissa needed. Carissa had the operational framing Ted lacked.
They worked well together.
Too well, at times.
Long hours. Shared workspaces. Conversations that drifted later than they should have. It had been physical once or twice, but that was incidental. What mattered was trust. Competence. The relief of not having to explain why something mattered.
Ted was brilliant, obsessive almost to a fault. At the time, it hadn’t been disabling—just something to manage. Carissa had been the balance he needed, and in return, Ted taught her things she never would have learned from professors or policy manuals.
She hadn’t known what would come later.
Now, years removed, she carried that history quietly. Ted wasn’t part of this operation. He couldn’t be. But the infrastructure she’d learned to build alongside him—the redundancies, the habit of seeing around corners, the discipline of assuming systems would fail—those remained.
They were still useful.
Ted was more a part of this than Matt would ever know.
Carissa closed the file and returned it to its place. Quiet was something she was used to, but this silence lingered longer than she liked.
It made her uneasy