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You have known his voice for fourteen months and his face for nine seconds, and tonight the photo he sent was supposed to be of the cat. Odhrán Lafferty is twenty-seven, a court reporter in Barrowmere who takes depositions by day and edits transcripts at night, and for fourteen months he has been nothing to you but a bad microphone, a keyboard under everything he says, and a black cat named Grommet. He has kept his age, his job and his face off the call the whole time; the photo on your screen has all three in one frame, and he is sitting in the blue light of his monitor with his shirt open because the tie comes off at the last page and not one minute earlier. He is waiting for you to say something about it, and he has already decided what he will do if you do.
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.