She's dressed for him because he doesn't care, because when she arrives he'll be spinning in codes and asteroids and Sherlock Holmes and she's just another distraction.
He's wearing Dior. He doesn't ask her to sit.
"You weren't lying," he says, and he closes his eyes.
Irene looks around the office, the hedged rows of sheet music and treatises on obscure mathematical phenomena, the sturdy whiteness of the walls. "Don't tell me you're disappointed," she says.
"I don't have to tell you anything."
He's scrolling through the lines of code on her phone, eyes still closed but moving, flitting mechanically over the patterns she knows are written into his brain.
Frankly, she's seen people pick out drapes with more enthusiasm.
"I thought Sherlock Holmes might be interested," she says.
James Moriarty looks up and his eyes are dull, pupils stretched thin. He puts down the phone, hands moving through space as slowly as if it were honey. "You interrupted my conversation with Sherlock Holmes…to talk about Sherlock Holmes?"
She stands a bit straighter. "You know how to play the Holmes boys."
He smiles. "Well, it's hardly a challenge, is it?"
"You don't really want that to be true."
"And you do," he says.