His eyes move around a room without settling, and he’s stood in the doorway for half a second before coming in as if he was deciding whether this conversation was happening today or not.
He sits in the chair near the window.
I close the document and wait.
"After the Nakamura deal closes," he says, "I want to step back."
I'm quiet for a moment. "From the business."
"From this." He gestures, an encompassing gesture that takes in the room and the island and presumably everything we've been doing for the last two years. "The way we're running things. The rotation. The arrangements." He meets my eyes. "All of it."
The thing about the three of us is that we became a pack from such a young age, we didn’t even realize what we were doing. We all went to the same school, and were classed as nerds. Our parents were happy, because neither of us had a friend until that point.
We became friends, best friends then we just molded together. We’d decided that one day we would go into business together and do everything that we’ve done. We didn’t realize that from such a tender age, we’d formed a pack.
"I'm hitting thirty," he says. "Santos too, in March."
"I'm aware."
"You're already there.”
"Also aware."
Because it’s not like him to beat around the bush. He leans forward with his forearms on his knees, a posture I rarely see from him, the posture of someone choosing honesty over presentation. "We swore off omegas when we were twenty-six, twenty-seven. We were young and it made sense. Omegas tended to want us for our money, more than anything else. Chiara was a lesson we paid for dearly.” He pauses. "But how long are we going to keep doing this.”
I say nothing.
"I don't want to be forty-five at the back of some club," Tomas says, "checking scents because all the omegas my age are already settled into packs and the only ones still available are twenty-two and looking for something I should want to give them but can't because I don't know them and I never did." He sits back. "That's where we're going."
I look at the window.
The water out there is doing the turquoise thing again.
"We're excellent at business," I say.
"Yes."
"As a pack," I say slowly, and this is the part I've been not looking at directly, "we're not as good."
Tomas stands. Straightens his collar out of habit. "After the deal," he says.
“We’ll go our separate ways,” I agree.
He leaves the way he came in, quietly and with his conclusions already made, and I hear his footsteps down the corridor toward his own room.
We haven't been right in three months, not since a woman in a red dress looked at us like she was surprised to be wanted and then trusted us with something I took and folded up neatly in a note.
Santos is on the beach.
He gravitates toward water and sunlight like a man with a prior arrangement with both, stretched out on a chair with a book.
He hears me coming across the sand and tips his sunglasses down.
"You have your thinking face on," he says. "The serious one. Not the working one."
"Tomas talked to me."
Santos puts the book down.