"What have you found this week?" she said finally.
"Your morning route is too consistent. You leave at the same time, walk the same path, stop at the same place. Anyone who wanted to plan something around your schedule has a reliable template."
"I'll vary the route," she said. No argument.
"The building's service entrance has no camera. It's accessible from the lane behind the building with a staff key stored in the building manager's office on a hook that's visible from the main door."
"I'll talk to the building manager."
"Let me manage the physical security of the building. It's what I'm for."
She looked at him. "Fine."
"Your office door. You leave it open most of the time."
"I work better with it open." She paused. "I'll be more careful."
"One more thing. The people who come to the office. Anyone whose access you're uncertain about? Anyone who has come recently who you didn't specifically invite?"
A pause that was almost imperceptible. Then: "No."
It was true. He had watched. It was also slightly too quick, and he made a note of it without following up.
"I'd like to continue," he said. "Beyond the week."
She was quiet. "My father told you something he didn't tell me," she said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Are you going to tell me?"
"When I have enough evidence to tell you something useful, yes. Not before. Not because I'm managing you. Because saying something before I can support it with evidence isn't honesty — it's speculation. And speculation about something like this is cruel."
She absorbed this. Then: "Continue." She picked up her phone. Then, without looking up: "The water distribution project. You asked who should read it first. Why?"
"Because you're going to implicate at least two sitting councillors in the ward-level analysis. And at least one is connected to your father's opposition. You need a clean chain — the right bureaucrat, then the right press contact. Otherwise it gets buried as politically motivated before anyone reads what it says."
She put the phone down. "You've read the project."
"I've read everything publicly available about you. Part of the job."
"Most people see it as policy work," she said slowly. "You saw it as something that would make powerful people uncomfortable."
"Both are true," he said. "Policy work that doesn't make powerful people uncomfortable is just filing."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up her phone. But the corner of her mouth had moved — not a smile exactly, but the thing before a smile, the thing that happened when someone encountered a thought they hadn't expected.
Arjun finished his coffee and went back to work. He was, he told himself, entirely focused on the job. He was professional. He was not thinking about the corner of her mouth.
He was, in fact, thinking about it all the way to the car.
