Rosa's daughter drives us to the meeting point, a hotel near the marina that is several categories above anything I've stayed in, all cool marble and quiet luxury and staff who look at you like you're exactly supposed to be there. A look I've never had directed at me before and would like to become more familiar with.
Carmen is waiting in the lobby. She looks me up and down.
"You can cook," she says.
"Yes," I say.
I have now told this lie twice with increasing conviction, which I think counts as growth.
I've memorized Anna's rice recipe in the car, mouthing the steps to myself like a prayer, and I've screenshotted all twenty-three recipes into an album calledProfessional Cooking Knowledge, and I've decided that three months is a long time and I'm a fast learner and the human species has been feeding itself for quite a while now. It can't be that hard.
The baby shifts. That small flutter that still surprises me every time, like a hello from someone who has already committed to showing up regardless of whether I've got the logistics sorted.
I put my hand over my stomach.
"I know," I tell her quietly. "We're figuring it out."
Carmen is already moving toward the elevators, talking departure times, kitchen layout, guest preferences, her omega scent of bergamot and clove lingers in the air. I pick up my duffel bag and follow.
Tonight I am also, technically, homeless, which means the island is the only destination I have, which does simplify things considerably.
It's all going to work out. I know it is.
9
MATTEO
The island is beautiful, but then again it always is. That's the point of it, the whole carefully constructed point, from the white sand to the water that can't decide between blue and green and settles on both, to the way the light comes off it in the late afternoon like the sun is making an argument for itself. We bought it seven years ago when the business hit its first genuinely obscene profit margin and Santos said, with the specific glee of a man who grew up with very little and intends to enjoy the correction, that he wanted an island.
I've been here four days and I've read every document I brought twice and reorganized the staff briefing notes for the Nakamura visit until they couldn't be improved further, and now I'm standing on the terrace with a glass of water watching the horizon do nothing in particular and feeling something I'm not accustomed to feeling.
Bored. Flatly, quietly, uncomfortably bored, with nothing to do with my hands and nowhere to put the energy except at the island being beautiful and the water being turquoise and both of them completely indifferent to my situation.
There are six omegas on the island this week. Staff arranged them, as they occasionally do before extended guest stays, rotation of company, familiar faces, willing. It's a system that has served its purpose before, uncomplicated, clean, no misunderstandings about what anything means or where it's going.
I looked at them when they arrived.
All of them fine. Carefully selected, professionally presented, willing in the explicit and informed sense of the word.
None of them right.
That is a thought I've been refusing to have clearly for four days, and I'm having it now because four days on a beautiful island with nothing left to organize has apparently worn down my defenses. They're too thin. Not unhealthily, just assembled, the look of women who have spent years knowing they were being watched and adjusted accordingly. Nothing soft about them in the way that actually registers.
And the scent.
That's the real problem.
Every omega has a scent. One carries warm peach threaded with black pepper; another is green fig and sea air; a third, bergamot softened at the edges. The fourth smells of dark cherry and smoke, the fifth of fresh linen over a cool citrus base, the sixth of amber and cardamom, arresting until it isn’t. None of them arouse me, let alone make me want to spend time with any of them.
I put the water glass down.
Tomas had a point, not that I'm going to say that out loud where he can hear it. There's a version of me that still believes what I did was the right call. But there's a smaller, quieter version, the one that’s nagging at me, what is the point of all of this if there’s never anyone apart from a pack with no omega, to share it with. I turn away from the water and go inside.
The knock on my door comes an hour later while I'm not reading a document I've already read twice.
Tomas doesn't wait for an answer, which is his habit in private spaces the same way it's Santos's habit everywhere. The difference is that when Santos does it, there's an implicit announcement in the way the door opens, here I am, delighted to find you, whereas Tomas enters a room the way he does most things, quietly and with prior conclusions already reached.
He looks tired.