Why had he even been concerned? He'd been drawn to Adelaide from the start, sensing the potential for a partner. An equal. In certain very distinct areas, his better. So naturally, he could trust her to be willing to do whatever was needed. With her as an ally, he might be able to salvage things. The Mayor could be paranoid, unpredictable... and Robert had started to carefully balance what the man knew with what was actually going on. Not unlike the way the Mayor insisted that the public only be fed specific pieces of information. Transparency was one of the easiest things in the world to manufacture, and when offered the comfort of security, people had a habit of buying into it. Robert's surveillance had grown from plants here and there to a very complicated forest of networked contacts, many of whom had no idea to whom they were actually reporting. The technical aspects were far more difficult, but he was making headway with it. There was a nanny cam in his son's room. There was also a nanny cam in the mayor's office. Audio bugs were easier to keep active, so more prevalent... and wherever he couldn't have a direct eye or ear in the mechanical sense of the word, there were people.
Human reporting was riddled with errors, but it was still reporting, and people weren't all that difficult to buy. Loyalty was cheap when decent living accommodations were so rare. One set of eyes at a remote shelter was good. Two were better. Three was preferable, enough so that he could cross-reference each report and dig the truth out of the conjecture.
In a world where knowledge was a powerful commodity, T. Robert Lansing wanted to know everything.
He trusted nobody. Not really, when it came down to it. His personal assistant and wife were the closest, with the next tier being reserved for people who proved themselves to be honest and predictable. The Archer Averys of the world. But could Robert really say that he trusted them when he watched everyone around him so closely? The fact that he'd bugged his own home and office only spoke to acknowledgment that he might not have total control over his environment. Maybe he didn't even trust himself.
These days, paranoia was cheaper than loyalty, it turned out.
But whether or not he was capable of such a thing, Adelaide was deserving of his trust. He had no doubts on that front, so his heart soars at her touch, brief as it was, and he drinks her words in like water, brightening even more as she validates his already high opinion of her. "Yes. Precisely. I didn't want to alarm you by telling you that our position is more precarious than I let on... but you've been beside me this whole time, helping me establish what we have here... and -- quite frankly -- I need you beside me, now, in order to keep it. You're my greatest asset, and I'm not the only one aware of that."
He hesitates just a moment, but ultimately places a forefinger on the manila folder and slides the file across the table in her direction. In it was all the information his assistant had managed to pull on Demi Rafferty in such a short amount of time, including a mugshot taken at her arrest to compare with a recent candid photograph of her after release. There aren't any photographs of her chatting with Adelaide in the file, but there don't need to be. The fact that he's showing her this at all says plainly that he knows they spoke. That he doesn't preface it with a confession or apology or any amount of contriteness at all shows that he assumes she already knows that he knew.
He doesn't underestimate her, after all, and expects her not to underestimate him in return.