Terms and Toast

You fall asleep around four with your phone still in your hand, the screen gone dark on the last thing either of you typed.

When you wake up, the conversation is still there. You read it twice. It doesn't look any less strange in daylight. A secret this big, sitting in a text thread between a pizza order confirmation and your mom asking if you've eaten a vegetable this week.

The apartment smells like something burning.

You find him at the toaster. Hood up. Two black squares on a plate. He doesn't turn around when you come in, but his shoulders go tight, the way they do.

"Morning," you say.

"Morning."

You stand there. He stands there. The radiator, freshly fixed, says nothing helpful.

"So," you say. "About last night."

"I meant what I sent."

"Which part?"

He turns. In the daylight from the window, with the hood still up, you can see half his face. The scar through his eyebrow. The grey eyes, ringed with shadows, like he didn't sleep either.

"All of it," he says.

He pulls out one of the two chairs at the tiny kitchen table and sits, which he has never done in front of you. After a second, you sit across from him. Your knees almost touch. The table is that small.

He pushes the plate of toast toward you.

"That's charcoal," you say.

"It's breakfast."

"It's a crime scene."

The corner of his mouth moves. Then he reaches up, and slowly, like it costs him something, he pushes the hood back.

The whole face. In daylight. At a distance of two feet.

You have to look at the table for a second. It's like looking straight at the sun.

"Yes," he says quietly. "It's me."

You knew. You knew at 3:07 in the morning with your hand on the wall. It still hits you like a missed step on the stairs.

"You're Nightjar."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like it's a person." He looks at his hands, the long fingers knotted together on the table. "It's a voice. A name on a screen. I'm the guy who burns toast."

You think about the song in your headphones on the bus home from your first breakup. About standing in your parents' backyard in Larkfield at nineteen, phone in hand, listening to "Paper Moons" on repeat before you walked inside and told them. About three million people reading your essay and writing in the comments, how does he know exactly how I feel?

And here he is, embarrassed, in a hoodie, at a table with a wobble in one leg.

"Okay," you say. Your voice comes out rough. "Okay. Then I have to tell you something too. And you're going to hate it."

His eyes come up. Wary.

"I work at Static & Bloom."

He doesn't move. He doesn't need to. You watch the color leave his face like a tide going out.

"The music site," he says.

"The music site."

"The one that ran a thirty-part thread last year trying to identify me from the shape of my ear."

"That wasn't me. That was Asa. I fact-checked it, though. For the record, your ear was very unremarkable."

He doesn't laugh. He gets up. Walks to the window. Stands with his back to you, looking at the rooftops, and you can see his hands shaking at his sides.

"And?" he says. "There's an and. I can hear it."

You take a breath. "And my editor assigned me to find Nightjar. Yesterday. Before I knew. Because I wrote an essay about you in college that went viral. 'The Voice in the Dark.'"

He turns around very slowly.

"That was you?"

"That was me."

"Bird sent me that essay," he says. "My producer. Three years ago. She said, 'Somebody out there gets it.'" He laughs, but there's nothing funny in it. "And now that somebody lives in my spare room."

"I'm not going to tell anyone."

"You don't know that."

"I do know that."

"Your job is to tell people."

"My job is to fact-check playlists. My dream is to write. Those aren't the same as selling out the guy who fixed my radiator." You stand up too. The kitchen is so small that it puts you right in front of him. "Theodore. Look at me."

He does. It's a lot.

"I'm not going to expose you. Not for a contract. Not for a cover. Not for anything."

He searches your face like he's looking for the lie. You let him look.

"Terms, Ethan," he says finally.

"Terms?"

"If we're doing this. Terms." He holds up one finger. "No lies. Not between us. If someone asks you something at work, I don't care what you tell them. But you don't lie to me."

"Deal. Same for you."

A beat. "Deal." A second finger. "No story. Nothing about me, ever, without my say."

"Deal."

A third finger, and then he hesitates, and lowers his hand. "That's it."

"You always have three rules."

"I didn't think of a third one."

"I'll think of one," you say. "Rule three: you stop burning the toast."

He looks at the plate. Then at you. Then, so quietly you almost miss it, he laughs, the same surprised sound from the blackout.

"That's not a rule," he says. "That's a miracle."

You're at your desk by ten, and your hands won't stop buzzing.

You've never held anything like this. It sits in your chest like a lit match. The office goes on around you: keyboards clacking, someone arguing about a playlist order, the neon LISTEN LOUDE sign humming. Nobody knows. Nobody can tell by looking at you that you ate charcoal toast across from the most famous anonymous voice on earth.

"You look like you saw a ghost," Kenji says, rolling his chair over. His film camera clunks against the desk. "Or a guy. Did you see a guy? Did you see the rest of the hoodie's face?"

"I saw a radiator," you say.

"Liar."

"I'm not lying. There was a radiator."

At eleven, Harriet strides out of her office with a printout in her hand. "Ethan. Asa. My office."

Asa gets up like he was waiting for it, buttoning his jacket. He's handsome in the way a catalogue is handsome, everything pressed and pleasing, and he smiles at you on the way in like you're an intern who brought the wrong coffee.

Harriet doesn't sit. "Status," she says to you. "Day two. Anything?"

You think of the envelope. The red stamp. The voice at 3:07.

Rule one: no lies to him. He didn't say anything about her.

"Nothing yet," you say. "I'm going through old forum posts. Demo leaks. Trying to map where the earliest uploads came from."

It's the first time you've ever lied to Harriet Vossberg. Your mouth is dry. Your face, you think, is fine.

"Good," she says. "Keep going. Because Asa found something."

Asa's smile widens. He sets a phone on the desk, screen up. It's a map, dotted with little red pins clustered across one river.

"A source at a delivery app," Asa says. "Corvane has been sending couriers with sealed packages to an address that changes every few months. Always the same recipient code. NJ." He taps the screen. "The last six months, every single delivery went to the same borough."

Harriet looks right at you. Her glasses glint.

"Nightjar," she says, "lives in Brooklyn."