The voice on the other end was low, precise, carrying the particular clean formality of someone who had learned English well enough to be careful with it. An Italian accent, unhurried, each word set down like it had been chosen rather than simply spoken.
"Dr. White."
"Who is this?" Abigail sat up straighter on the couch, notebook sliding off her knee onto the cushion beside her. "How did you get this number?"
"My name is Father Matteo Ferrara. I'm calling from Rome." A beat, the small courtesy of a pause before the apology. "I apologize for the hour."
"Rome?" She kept her voice flat, unsoftened. Somewhere behind the flatness, a small, cold current had already started moving. "As in Italy, or Rome as in the Church?"
"Both."
She sat with that a moment. Outside, past the window that had, less than an hour ago, held a shape in its reflection that shouldn't have been there, the street was silent in the particular way a city street is silent at two in the morning — not empty, exactly, just paused.
"What does the Vatican want with a forensic psychologist?"
"There is a situation in England," Ferrara said. "A village in Kent. People are being affected in ways our people have been unable to address." He paused again, and she was beginning to understand that his pauses were not hesitation but punctuation, each one placed exactly where he wanted it. "We believe your background — the intersection of behavioral science and your academic research — makes you uniquely suited to help us understand what we're looking at."
"My academic research." She said it carefully, testing the shape of the sentence before she committed to the rest of it. "Which research, specifically?"
The pause that followed ran slightly longer than the others had. Long enough that she noticed the length of it as its own piece of information.
"Your pattern analysis work," he said. "The behavioral documentation."
Abigail stood. She was not aware, in the moment, of having decided to stand — only that she was suddenly on her feet, the phone gripped a fraction too hard against her ear, the apartment's ordinary furniture suddenly arranged around her like the walls of a room she no longer entirely trusted.
"That work isn't published," she said. "It isn't affiliated with any institution. It's personal research." A beat, her own voice going harder now, the doctor's calm she'd spent years cultivating starting to fray at exactly one specific edge. "How do you know about it?"
Silence on the line. Not dead air — she could hear him still there, breathing, the faint hiss of an overseas connection — but a silence with weight in it, the particular silence of someone deciding how much of the truth a sentence could safely carry.
"Father Ferrara." Harder still. "How does the Vatican know about research I conduct privately, at home, that no one else has ever seen?"
"There is a program," he said, carefully, each word set down like the last one had been. "An online academic resource that covers the subjects you've been researching. We became aware of it some time ago. We have been monitoring who accesses it."
Something in Abigail's chest went very cold, very quickly.
"You've been watching me."
"We've been watching the program." A pause. "You are the first analyst with your particular background to reach the stage you've reached." Another beat, and something in his voice shifted — not warmer, exactly, but more direct, a man deciding to stop circling a point and simply land on it. "That makes you valuable to us."
She should have hung up. She understood that, distantly, the way she'd understood she should close the laptop hours earlier and had closed it anyway, too late, after the shape had already found her in the glass. Instead, the part of her that had built an entire career on the specific discipline of asking the next question regardless of how much she wanted to stop asking questions took over completely, the way it always eventually did.
"Who built the program?"
A longer pause this time. Long enough that she pulled the phone slightly away from her ear to check the call was still connected.
"That is one of the things we'd like to discuss with you," Ferrara said. "In person." A beat. "We did not build it, Dr. White. We found it. The same way you did." Quieter now, and something in the quiet frightened her more than anything he'd said with volume behind it. "We've never been able to shut it down."
Abigail went very still.
"What is in that village?"
"Something that our methods cannot address." A beat, longer than any that had come before it. "Something that we believe found you before we did."
She lowered the phone a few inches from her face, not hanging up, just needing, for a moment, the small distance of not having his voice directly against her ear. The room felt colder than it had a minute ago. The shadows in the corners — the same corners she'd checked twice already tonight — seemed to have deepened without her watching them do it.
She raised the phone again.
"Send me what you have on the village," she said. "I'll look at it tonight." A beat, drawing a line she wasn't entirely sure she believed she could hold. "I'm not agreeing to anything yet."
"Of course, Dr. White." Something in his voice now that might have been relief, might have been something closer to satisfaction, the two feelings close enough together in a tired man's voice at two in the morning that she couldn't have separated them if she'd tried. "Thank you for picking up."
The line went dead.
Abigail stood alone in her living room, phone still raised halfway to her ear, and did not move for a long time. Somewhere across an ocean, a man she'd never met and would meet in a matter of days had just confirmed, without ever quite saying it outright, that whatever had been watching her through a laptop screen for the past three weeks was not a program the Vatican had built to find people like her.
It was something the Vatican had found the same way she had.
Followed the same door she had followed.
And arrived, apparently, too late to be the one who got there first.