When she looks back up, her expression is exactly what it has been all evening, warm and composed Ava. She turns to Clemente with a smile as he retakes his seat and says something light about the view and the evening, and the conversation flows back into whatever it had been before he left.
Reaching for my own glass, my hand is completely steady.
Inside, I am not steady at all.
Clemente looks between us at some point later in the evening, one of those casual sweeping glances that isn’t casual at all, the eyes of a man who monitors everything in his orbit, including the way his guest looks at his woman and smiles.
“She’s very beautiful, isn’t she.”
Not a question.
A test of a different kind.
Looking at Riley, at Ava, with the appropriate appreciation of a man who has noticed and is being asked to acknowledge it, nothing more and nothing less.
“She is.”
Clemente’s smile widens. Satisfied.
He reaches over and runs his hand down Riley’s face, slow, proprietary, and certain. Riley leans into it slightly and smiles up at him, and I look back at my wine.
Marco Reyes thinks about nothing at all.
Ryan thinks about everything.
***
Dinner ends late.
Clemente shakes my hand at the door with the warmth of a man who has decided something, not fully, not yet, but the beginning of trust is there, laid like the first course of something that will take time to build, and tells me we will talk more in the morning.
“Sleep well, Marco.”
“Thank you for your hospitality.”
Walking back along the stone path through the darkened gardens toward the villa, the ocean constant behind the walls, the guards move at the perimeter in the patterns I have been mapping all evening. My pace stays unhurried, my hands are loose at my sides, and my face is the face of a man who has had a pleasant dinner and is looking forward to his bed.
Not letting any of it show until the villa door closes behind me.
I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time without moving.
The servant has turned down the sheets and left a light on, and the ocean is audible through the window, closer out here than in the main house, its sound larger, more present.
Moving to where my jacket hangs on the back of the chair, I run my thumb along the inside lining until I find the seam.
Press once.
Still there.
I take it out.
The three of us—eight months ago.
I put it back.
She had seen me.
Watching it happen across that dinner table, piece by piece, the recognition assembling itself in her eyes despite everything done to prevent it. The beard, the contacts, and the carefulconstruction of a man who bore no resemblance to anyone she had ever known.