She gets taken in Bangkok. He doesn't see it coming.
He never sees it coming.
Nick can't remember a time when he owned more than a backpack's worth of belongings, and he's never had anything that he couldn't afford to lose.
We can't get attached, his father used to say. Nick used to say it to Cassie, who would systematically ignore him. She had favorite clothes, cities, hotels, restaurants, people. It was incredibly annoying. Now that she's gone, of course, he'd give anything to hear her bitch and complain about how she had to leave behind her vintage Goldworm floral plaid print mini-dress in Vancouver.
This is how he misses people: he remembers their bad habits more than their good ones, for instance, his father's snoring, the way his mother screeched incoherently when she was angry, and how Kira would drench herself in so much perfume that his eyes would water whenever he got close to her.
About Cassie, he misses, in no particular order:
a) how she bit her nails all the time, even when he got her some of that herbal stuff that made her fingers taste bad,
b) her borderline alcoholism,
c) how she'd sing along to Korean pop music too loud and too off key,
d) how she'd overreact to everything, get angry at the slightest provocation, throwing fits worthy of the brattiest, most spoiled toddlers, and prod and poke at him spewing nasty vile out of her pretty mouth until Nick snapped and said something mean back whereupon she would sulk and make him feel like an asshole for at least a week, and
e) how she would save his ass at least once a day, whether from cops or Division goons or inclement weather.
(Actually. He probably misses the last one the most.)
They keep moving her. The second he narrows down the new location they ship her off somewhere else. It's been almost a year. Nick can barely think anymore.
A Watcher in Mexico City gets him a lead on Carver's replacement, a woman named Nadia. "A nasty puja," says the Watcher, whose sketches are much better than Cassie's. Nick can't stand the guy.
Nadia leads him to Tokyo, which leads him to a lesser-ranked Division agent who was in charge of Cassie for a couple months, Jay Huang, whose personnel file leads him to a facility in Russia. He takes a red eye to Moscow, rents a car and meets up with two other Movers, people Cassie had known. They hit the building hard, and the only reason it works is because they don't have a plan.
(A secret about Watchers: they can't be Pushed. Thus there are no brainwashed Watcher agents, and the only predictions they can get are from people like Cassie and her mother, kept locked away and drugged and tortured. Those visions are sporadic, at best, and the smart ones, smart like Cassie and Elizabeth, know how to hold back the most important parts. And Nick, well, Nick knows how to play things by ear.
Why there are no Watcher agents: because Watchers know who's going to win.)
There is a single Mover guard, and six other armed non-Specials. One scientist on duty, who goes instantly pale and flees the minute he gets a chance.
It's easy because there's barely anything worth anything, just some inconsequential research on Specials' DNA, some outdated files, a stockpile of drugs. The explosion is bigger than anything in the actual facility.
As the building burns, he sends a text to Nadia from a disposable cell phone. Game on.
(He doesn't know what the fuck he's doing, but that's actually a good thing.)
Nadia, no last name, a former Mossad agent who defected to the States in the early 90s, a Pusher with a longer range than any other Nick has ever come into contact with. Nick sees her in person exactly once, in Belgium of all places. He fucked up, almost got himself killed, got shot in the leg and he lost two months in recovery and lost track of Cassie's location altogether.
She has scars running down her forehead like vines and a steady hand with a knife. She wears expensive, tailored pantsuits and designer jewelry, flies everywhere in private jets. Nick's heard dozens of stories of her cruelty, has even met a couple of her victims in person, seen for himself just how much Nadia deserves a bullet in the brain.
(All he can think about, all he can see in his mind's eye, is Cassie, tied to a hospital bed, miles and miles of vulnerable, pale skin and he can't think. He can't think.)
Nick isn't very good at taking care of himself, let alone other people, and this became abundantly clear to Cassie very quickly.
They were fleeing Hong Kong in the cargo bay of a freight airplane, Cassie slowly bleeding from a bullet graze on her left arm, Nick with a mild concussion and both of their clothes soaked in motor oil, and it was, basically, all Nick's fault.
Cassie had rolled her eyes, bandaged her own arm with strips of polyester from her skirt, soaked up the excess oil and slapped one of her black gel pen drawings in his face. "You see? You see this shit?" The rough sketch was of them in that exact moment, oil and all. "Now will you listen to me?! For God's fucking sake."
"Okay, okay – ow!"
"Shut up." She flipped through her book frantically, holding up another drawing, this one of a gruesome scene detailing two bloody stick figures labeled Me and Nick. "I saw this last night, okay, I don't know why but it's going to come true if we don't do something about it, and if you don'tlisten to me, you giant idiot."
Nick blinked his fuzzy eyes and tried to look as contrite as possible. "Okay. I will, I'm sorry. I'll listen to you from now on, okay?"
She just looked at him, mouth crooked downwards unhappily. "No, you won't," she grumbled, and reached out and wiped the blood away from his forehead with gentle, gentle fingertips.
Cassie's sketchbook is a guiding light and has, in the months since she's been taken, saved his ass numerous times in lieu of Cassie herself.
She'd graduated to a full-blown sketchbook and it's nearly full, pages and pages of scribbles and nearly incomprehensible drawings. It's only because he studies it like a Bible that he's able to make any use of it at all; they usually only make sense seconds before Nick needs them to, without Cassie there to translate.
There are other things in there too, little notes she'd written to herself, plans and IOUs and reminders. On the last page, remnants of old tic tac toe and hangman games they'd played on plane and train rides, and a snippet of a written conversation between the two of them that one time when they'd been trapped in someone's closet, hiding from security guards.
Nick found the note about a month after she was taken, on the back of a drawing towards the middle of the book. He was pretty fucking chagrined that it took him that long; in his defense, the first month had been a blur of sleepless nights and frantic searching and a few, rather large, explosions.
Nick –
I don't have much time but I know they're gonna get me and it won't be long now. I can't change it, I don't know how it happened but something we did, maybe it was me, I don't know, but anyway, it's going to happen, we can't change it. I'm going to get out, though. I know that happens too, and I know it'll be you who saves me. So thanks, or whatever.
Don't beat yourself up about it, it's a waste of time and anyway there are better things to do, like saving my ass. Don't give up, you'll figure it out. I know you'll find me. You're smarter than you think you are.
I'm scared. I'm really scared but I know it's going to be okay, we're going to get through this. It's just going to suck really hard in the mean time, you know.
Just don't give up. And when you find me, don't bring a gun.
- Cassie
Nick has read it a million times, and yet has none of Cassie's certainty or optimism. There have been days when he's been certain that she's dead, or worse, that they've dissected her, chopped her into little pieces, injected her with R-16, carved out her insides, drugged her until she's brain dead. Every missing person poster he sees, every news report of a murdered girl, unidentified body in the paper, he sees her face, fills in the blanks, thinks of how thin she was, how he used to pick her up and swing her around by her waist, thinks about how she weighed almost nothing at all.
The drawing on the opposite side of the note is one that he knows is important, but he can't make sense of it without context. It's of him and Cassie sitting in what could either be a boat or a car or hell, an airplane, who even knows, and there's a dead stick figure behind him, laying in a pool of Crayola red blood. He hopes it's still going to come true, and he hopes the dead body is Nadia.
(If visions were promises, Cassie used to say, ruefully.)
Cassie's first kiss is with Emily Hu in Hong Kong. Nick walked in on it.
"Oh my fucking God," he exclaimed.
"Oh," said Emily Hu.
"Jesus, Nick," Cassie added, and rolled her eyes.
He'd been torn between she's thirteen years old, you sexual predator and I can't deal with a sexuality crisis, Jesus Christ and Cassie had, predictably, waved away both reactions with a wave of her tiny hand.
"I just wanted to try it," she said.
Her romantic life hadn't gotten any less stressful for Nick, who in the years that they'd been running together, had witnessed far too many of her dalliances and experiments than he was entirely comfortable with.
He beat up a punk in London for taking things too far with her, chased off a scary-looking lesbian with tattoos on her face in Mombassa, threatened an entirely too wholesome looking Shifter in Manhattan who showed up for a date. Each boundary she pushed tested the limits of his blood pressure, to the point where he absolutely dreaded each new addition to her little black book.
"God, you're just a kid," he said once, after a ridiculous night involving an amorous hedge fund manager, his wife, and Cassie. "You should be like, idolizing movie stars and thinking boys are icky, not breaking up marriages."
"Boys are icky," Cassie commented idly. "Why, is that what you did?"
Nick thought of losing his virginity, to a whore in Shanghai, when he was twelve. "Uh, no?"
Cassie smirked. "I see."
"Look, I'm just saying – you don't have to jump in head first. You don't have anything to prove."
"Who says I'm trying to prove anything?" she said, shading in a gut wound in her notebook. "Look, you're sweet and everything, and I really appreciate the backup, I do, but don't stress out about my innocence or anything. I've got it under control."
He snorted and acted like he didn't believe her, even though he actually kind of did.
He hopes Cassie can See him, and he hopes that if she can, that she's proud of him. It's not often that your friend/brother figure/co-dependent partner in crime/soul mate/whatever, it's complicated becomes an international terrorist for your sake.
He blows up six separate facilities in the span of two months, and it takes Division that long to get his name on Interpol's Most Wanted list. It's actually kind of surprising that it took so long; he must be doing more damage than he thought.
His benefactor is a Shadow named Jude, the CEO of a transnational financial firm with more money than God. Nick had met him through one of Cassie's contacts in Australia, and he has, if possible, more reason to bring down Division than any of them.
"They killed my entire family," he tells Nick, the first time they meet, calmly and logically. "They weren't even Specials. They were just trying to hide me."
Nick shakes his hand and tells him everything. Trust is a two way street.
Thus, he has a bankroll to rival Nadia's, and enough explosives stashed in enough places so that wherever he goes, he has the ability to fuck shit up. He evades Division agents, and Nadia, by not thinking much, drinking heavily, focusing intensely on Cassie and his desperation to find her, anything to blur his intentions, even from himself.
Nadia is good, though. Nadia is very, very good, and he has far more close calls than he is comfortable with.
One, a minor lab in Argentina, she actually beats him to. It's his own fault, he'd been planning too hard, and he went in without back up, stupidly. He gets pinned down by two Movers as Nadia, viciously smiling, tries to Push Cassie out of his head.
He doesn't know what happens, all he remembers is screaming himself hoarse, and passing out, and when he wakes up, the Movers are dead and Nadia is gone.
They found Cassie's mother right after Cassie turned sixteen. It was like a twisted, horrible, tragic birthday present, Nick remembers thinking.
It was almost funny, how easy it had been in the end. A small lab, not heavily guarded, in Chicago. They went in alone, got Elizabeth out, without casualties. In and out in under forty minutes.
It wasn't until they got back to their motel that they realized that Elizabeth wasn't waking up.
They waited for almost two days, Cassie becoming more and more frantic, waiting and waiting for the drugs to work themselves out of her system, pouring water down her throat to keep her hydrated. They finally had to take her to a hospital for fear she'd starve to death, and by then their pictures had been circulated all over the country so they couldn't even go in with her.
Cassie cried all night, sitting in the driver's seat of the car, clutching the wheel tightly, staring across the street at the bright lights of the hospital. Nick didn't try to talk to her, he just sat next to her, brought her fast food, gave her his sweater when she started to shiver. She finally drove away around four o'clock the next morning, blasting the radio at top volume and running stop signs at every turn.
Elizabeth spent six months in a coma at Chicago General, and died peacefully in her sleep. Nick found this out from keeping careful tabs on news reports, but Cassie knew because she'd Seen it happen that night, in the parking lot.
They don't talk about it.
He doesn't know when it happened, but he can't be Pushed anymore. He practices for a week with a Pusher he met through Jude, who spends hours trying to convince Nick to touch his toes, go get him a soda, sing Mary Had a Little Lamb. It doesn't work.
"It's like trying to brainwash a stuffed animal," the Pusher says. "There's just nothing there."
Nick thinks of all the times Cassie called him an airhead. "Maybe I'm a zombie."
The Pusher regards him suspiciously, halfway convinced.
It's a powerful advantage, and he doesn't know when it happens, just that it had to do with the encounter with Nadia in Argentina, and also that Cassie had Seen it. There's a drawing in the sketchbook that he'd never been able to make sense of, a man's head with circular lines all around the forehead, like a shield. How could it possibly mean anything else?
(He thinks about a Watcher he met a while back, one of the ones who had lost their grip on reality. She lived in her head, and Nick had gone to visit her to see if she was useful, but all she'd told him was, they won't find you, they won't find you, and you're the key and your brain is iron, she can't get past your eyes. Sometimes, visions don't make sense until after the fact.)
It might be the advantage he needs to get Cassie out for good, but her trail's gone completely stone cold. They know what he wants, now, and they're going to do everything they can to keep from giving it to him.
"I need leverage," Nick confides to Jude one evening, sitting on the balcony of one of his many apartments. "Just blowing up minor labs here and there isn't going to get me anywhere."
"So blow up something bigger," Jude directs, his accent making the words sound crisp and sharp. "Hit them where it hurts. They know you're powerful, they'd have taken you down years ago if they could."
Nick flexes his hands, his permanently scarred knuckles looking pale and grotesque in the fading light. "What's big enough to make them give me Cassie?" he asks.
Jude smiles slowly, swirling his wine slowly. "I have a few ideas," he says.
Two targets. One, the main research lab, in Hong Kong, of course. The second, the main Division office in Washington D.C., where hundreds of agents sit at cubicles every day, drink coffee in break rooms, go out for lunch at expensive delis, and calmly and methodically plan all the logistics of the mass kidnapping and torture of thousands of Specials.
Nick feels a little sick. He's never thought of himself as a murderer, and that's about to change.
Jude finds him manpower and gives him money, and he plans the whole thing from his penthouse, Shadowed and locked away and still half-ready to back out of the whole thing, which is probably the only thing keeping the Watchers off his ass. Jude's Watcher friend, in fact, can't even get a hold on how the thing will turn out, which is as good of an omen as Nick's going to get.
A crew of thirteen – two Bleeders, six Movers, two Pushers, a Shifter, Nick and Jude. The research lab is relatively easy, a strategically placed car bomb in the middle of the night to reduce civilian casualties and it's done. The D.C. office takes more stealth, which is how Nick ends up waltzing inside, his face Shifted to look like someone else's.
He barely makes it through without puking his guts all over the carpet; seeing their faces up close is a trial that he almost doesn't pass. He tries very hard not to think, concentrates on Cassie, Cassie and Elizabeth and Jude and every other person Division has systematically destroyed and wonders, for the millionth time, how his father had done this for a living.
He plants about five pounds of C4 in an abandoned bathroom, escapes, and detonates from a warehouse across town, hands shaking.
They run into trouble on their way out of town, and they lose two people in the ensuing firefight at their warehouse – Rachel, a Bleeder, and one of their Movers, Lex. Nick tries not to think about it. There won't be time for a memorial service.
From a penthouse in upstate New York, on an encrypted phone line, Nick calls Nadia.
"Mr. Gant," she greets. Her accent is almost completely gone, it's the neutral voice of a spy, a ruthless agent, a dangerous person. "I would say it's nice to hear your voice again but that would be a bald faced lie."
"Nadia, have you had a nice day?" Nick asks blandly. "Sorry about your office. Hope you're insured."
"You will die for what you have done," Nadia informs him calmly.
"Not today I won't," Nick replies. "You know what I want. We can do this the easy way or the hard way."
"You will stop this," Nadia says, and Nick feels the same blunt headache he did from before. She's trying to Push him. She can Push people over a phone line. A shiver skates down his spine. "You will turn yourself in immediately."
He lets the silence stretch until she feels a bit more confident, then says, "huh. Nice try."
"Do not push me," she hisses, the first sign of her calm breaking.
"No, you don't fucking push me," he snarls, feeling the weight of the last year and a half pushing on his chest. "I murdered almost 200 people today. Division agents. I'll kill every last one of you if I have to. Do you really want to test my resolve?"
A long beat, and she finally replies, "I will have to discuss this with my superiors."
"Do it quick. You'll hear from me again tomorrow," he says, and hangs up. Then he stumbles into the bathroom and throws up violently.
The first time Cassie killed somebody, she was seventeen and she shot a Pusher before he could get into her head.
Nick rubbed her back as she vomited, murmuring nonsense into her ear.
"God, shut up, shut up," she said, pushing him away. "I don't want to hear it."
"You didn't do anything wrong," he said anyway. "He would've killed you. Or worse."
"I fucking know," she said fiercely, and he realized with a sick drop of his stomach that she probably did, that she probably had a drawing of what might have happened in her book, that it's probably why she shot the guy in the first place.
It was the first time they ever got drunk together, sitting on the floor of the motel bathroom, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth. Cassie passed out in his lap around midnight and he drank the rest of the booze slowly, one hand on her shoulder, feeling the movements of her breath beneath his palm.
The next morning she'd hid her face beneath huge sunglasses and hunched herself into a tiny ball in the passenger's seat. They were on their way to get new papers, passage out of the country, to a place that might be a little safer, across the continent, but Cassie was unusually disinterested, drifting and blank-faced.
He picked a fight with her, just to get her to make a goddamn expression.
"I know what you're doing," she'd hissed, kicking at the dashboard with her oversized boots. "Just cut it out. I'm not your sister, I'm not your fucking daughter, you don't need to coddle me."
"Maybe you need it," he gambled, and laughed, entirely devoid of humor.
"Maybe you're an asshole," she replied, and didn't talk for the rest of the day. Nick let her be.
It's almost anti-climatic; she's been gone for almost two years now and he manages to get her out with a couple weeks of planning, some strategically placed explosives and the help of the rest of Jude's team. His team. Whatever.
In the end, Nadia hadn't had to give him anything. The explosion world tour had done its job, it drew all the wrong kind of attention. The official word from D.C. was a terrorist attack, no suspects, but the media was calling bullshit, a journalist from New York had done an expose piece on Division last year and won a Pulitzer, there was footage of Movers on YouTube, forums and websites that Specials use to organize and evade Division agents, way too much evidence to sweep under the rug. The snowball gaining momentum, growing bigger and bigger.
A mole within Division that calls themselves Achilles releases a current list of all their facilities. It doesn't take long to narrow down which are prisons, which are hospital facilities, which are research labs or training warehouses. Cassie's been held for the last three months in a facility in bumfuck nowhere, South Dakota.
She's unconscious when he gets to her, in a hospital bed hooked up to three IVs, and the walls are bright green with strange streaks on them, like smeared, white paint. He recalls immediately a drawing from her book, her asleep under the smudged wall, and his stomach drops to his feet.
He's got her almost all the way out when a Mover guard catches him by surprise. He registers his gun sliding out of its holster a split second before it goes off, and he twists out of the way, just barely missing a bloody, painful death.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he mutters, Moving the gun out of the way, getting caught in the stomach by the guard's Technicolor blast of power. He Moves Cassie across the floor, wincing as she hits the wall limply, a thin rag doll.
It's a struggle of wills after that; the thing is that Nick's mastery of his ability hasn't gotten that much better, really, he's just gotten better at catching them off guard. The Mover guard is stronger, better trained, and Nick thinks it'd be really motherfucking ironic if he got killed like, two freaking minutes after he got to Cassie, after all this time.
That is, until she climbs to her feet and fucking kicks the shit out of the guy.
"I told you not to bring a fucking gun!" she screeches, looming over his bruised body on the floor.
"You know how I have problems with listening," he replies, smiling through the blood.
He used to think Kira could be saved. A long time ago, before – before a lot of things.
No matter what Cassie Saw, no matter how many visions she'd scribble down, he refused to believe that there wasn't a way, that there wasn't something he could do to reach her. No matter how many times he tried, and how many times he nearly got himself killed for his trouble.
"What, are you stupid?" Cassie would demand. (Probably.)
It wasn't even about Kira, not really, he didn't even know who or what Kira really was. Whether it was real or not, whether she'd been Pushed by Carver or a willing agent, whether any of it had ever fucking happened at all, it all tangled up in his head until he couldn't sort any of it out. The whole mess of his life before Hong Kong is mostly a blur of a dozen different cities, cheating out a living and the sharp tang of desperation at the back of his throat. His life came into focus in Hong Kong, with Cassie and her short skirts and her black notebook and her lotus flower, and Kira, Kira was a casualty of a power struggle that Nick had no part in creating.
It was about trying to make sense out of something, that's why he'd wanted to save her. To prove maybe, that she could be saved, or that any of them could be saved. To prove that something of a person was still there after a Push, that they couldn't just reach into a brain and erase everything that was, replace and rearrange it all to their liking, easy as pie.
The closest they ever get to Kira is in Los Angeles, two steps behind as usual. A mussed bed, a wet shower, still with steam on the mirror, an empty Burger King bag on the desk. They'd missed her by maybe twenty minutes.
Cassie sat with him on the roof of the hotel and drew in her sketchbook while he stared out into the horizon, trying to gather some motivation to move.
"Here," she said, and nudged his arm, holding out the book. Her drawing never got any better.
"What?" he replied. "Is that a…bowling alley?"
"No, dork. It's an apartment. See? Those are the windows. The couch, TV. That's a plant or something, and the kitchen is over here."
Nick squinted at the drawing, seeing the bare bones of what she was describing. "Uh, okay, anything special about this apartment?"
"It's ours," she said simply. "It's where we'll live, when it's all over."
He looked at her incredulously. "When it's over?" he said. "You mean, this is going to end?"
"Duh." She snatched back the notebook, pulling another gel pen out of her hair, uncapping it with her teeth. "Someday. I dunno when, but I'll let you know when I do."
She looks older and younger all at once, thin as a stick but still older looking. Her hips are wider, her face is filled out a little more. It's like looking at a memory and a dream all at once, two negatives laid on top of each other, old and new, familiar and strange.
She moves quicker than he does, wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls him out, deceptively strong. They meet up with the rest of the team on the ground outside, and she knows where the getaway van is stashed without any of them having to tell her.
He can't stop touching her.
"God, Nick, fuck," she keeps muttering, clutching his hand so hard he can feel her nails digging into his skin, little pinpricks of pain. "Fuck, you came, I knew it. I knew it. Nick. Nick."
"I looked," he says, fuzzy with pain and blood loss and relief, "I never stopped."
"I know, Nick, I Saw," she says, running bony fingers through his hair, tears streaking down her face. "I was Watching you. I could See."
"I was afraid I might have blown you up," he mutters, and she giggles, choked and quiet.
"Nah," she replies, pressing her cheek to his forehead. "You blew up the bad guys. You motherfucker. You motherfucking bad ass."
"Bad ass," he repeats. "Yeah, right."
"My hero," she insists.
In Fort Worth, squatting in an abandoned house, hiding from Nadia, they fucked for the first time, on an old mattress. Cassie kept sneezing from all the dust, and Nick laughed when she had to stop to blow her nose, and she made a crack about how she could blow something else while she was at it, and when they finally got down to business, it was pretty goddamn spectacular.
It was about a month before she was taken, and Nick was drunk on possibility, on a safe place to stay, on the prospect of actually staying put for longer than a couple of weeks for once. Cassie's visions had settled, finally, her headaches not bothering her as much, and Fort Worth seemed a million miles away from blood and grease and gunshot residue.
After, they drank lukewarm beer and lay naked in bed together, watching the sunlight move across the bare floor. He could feel her jerking against him as she had random visions, little flashes that she had all the time. Sometimes he thought it was a wonder that she wasn't insane, for how many futures she saw in any given second.
"We're so fucked up," she murmured into his shoulder, eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks.
He held her hip in one of his hands, tracing the marks he'd left behind earlier. "Speak for yourself, I'm actually pretty well-adjusted."
She snorted. "Right. Mr. Well-Adjusted. Captain America."
"What are you Seeing?"
"Lots of things." She shrugged. "I can't make sense of it yet. We changed something."
"By sleeping together?" he asked, surprised.
"It wasn't going to happen, before," she said, matter of factly. "Originally, we just danced around it for a long time. And you got married to someone else, I think."
"You're shitting me," he said.
"I said I think," she replied. "Anyway, it doesn't happen like that anymore. We changed it."
"Well, what happens now?"
"I'm not sure yet," she said. "I – it's hard to make out. There's – " she frowned, tension slowly spreading through her shoulders again. Nick pulled her closer, wanting to ward it all off again, go back to the relaxed silence of before. "I – I don't know. We changed it."
"Well," he said, for lack of anything better, "I'm glad to know the infinite power of my dick."
She snorted with laughter, shaking her hair into his face. "Fuck you," she said.
"You're making it too easy on me now," he complained, and rolled her over. She went easy, knees curling up around his waist, her fingers scrabbling at his shoulders.
Later, when they were lying in the dark, she turned and whispered, "I love you, Nick."
He said, "I love you too," and "don't cry," and "whatever you Saw, we'll fix it," and held her while she sobbed, and a month later they were in Bangkok and they stole her from him in a crowded restaurant, right from under his nose.
He didn't see it coming. But she did.