I need something to focus on that isn't Chiara's face or the name of the bastard who knocked Jennifer up and left her to figure it out alone.
I go back up the hill.
20
MATTEO
Iclose the laptop to check on Jennifer.
Santos is still in the corridor, no longer on the floor, standing now with his arms folded and his back against the wall, looking at the closed door with the focused attention of a man listening through it.
"Still sleeping," he says, before I ask.
"Her scent," I say.
He tilts his head slightly, reading the air the way Santos always does, instinctively, before his brain has finished framing the question. Something in his expression shifts. "Settling," he says. "The peak has passed. It's quieter."
I put my hand on the door. Not to open it. Just to feel the warmth of the room through it, to confirm what Santos is telling me. The strawberry is there, softer now, the rose lying flat underneath it with its thorns down.
"The heat has finished," I say.
Santos exhales. Not a long breath. Just the kind that carries something with it.
"Good," he says.
"Go and eat something," I tell him. "You've been here three hours."
“Don’t remind me, that it takes so long. It feels longer when you say it out loud,” he says.
"Santos."
He looks at me with the expression he uses when he knows I'm right and objects to it on principle. Then he pushes off the wall and goes toward the kitchen, one hand dragging through his hair.
I stay.
I stand in the corridor outside her door and I think about Jennifer sitting in that study chair gripping the armrests, telling me this was a professional meeting and she was fine, just warm, and the look on her face when she said the baby, like she was handing over something she'd been carrying alone for a very long time and wasn't sure she trusted us with it.
She was right not to trust us.
I hear Tomas on the shell path before I see him. His footsteps are recognizable after fifteen years, that particular deliberate pace, faster than usual tonight, which means something has happened that I don't know about yet. I move to the end of the corridor where the window looks down toward the bay path.
He's coming up the hill in the last of the evening light, jacket on, hands free, which means the supplies are already inside. Carmen must have taken them. He's looking at the ground in front of him with the expression he wears when he's solved one problem and walked directly into another.
I go to the front door and open it.
He stops on the path when he sees me.
"The heat," he says.
"Has passed," I say. "She's still sleeping but the worst of it is done."
Something in his shoulders drops half an inch. "Good." He comes up the last of the path. "I've found her taco truck. I'm going to get it back for her. It's the least we can do."
"Good." I look at him. "There's something else."
He stops on the step below me, which puts us level. His gray eyes are doing the thing where he's choosing his words before he opens his mouth, not because he's uncertain, but because he wants to get it right. "I ran into someone at the bay."
I wait.