Ethan
The invitation arrived by email late Friday evening, terse enough that I nearly deleted it as spam before I registered the sender's name. Sebastian Ashford. Subject line: A conversation, off the record. Care to join me for a drink tonight? Somewhere neither of us has to perform for an audience.
I should have declined. Every instinct I'd cultivated over the past year told me that meeting privately with the husband of the woman I was actively working to destabilize was a strategic error, the kind of unnecessary risk that gave the other side information they shouldn't have. But something in the phrasing, the deliberate acknowledgment that both of us had been performing all week, made me curious enough to type back a single word. Where.
The address he sent wasn't anywhere I expected.
