Chapter 22
Logan's security men are efficient, professional. One checks the cottage perimeter while the other unloads my duffels. They'll rotate twelve-hour shifts from the corner, one tells me. Until Gunner clears the detail. I nod without speaking, my anger still too hot for words.
Nicolas opens the door before I reach the porch. Paint-stained shirt, cerulean smudge on his left thumb, glasses pushed up on his forehead. He's been working. He hasn't been told I'm coming.
"I didn't know you were coming, mija." Warm, no edge, no confusion.
I can't explain, not with this anger burning so hot in my chest that any words would come out sharp enough to wound him. I tell him I'm home for a few days, standing on the porch with duffels at my feet and a face he hasn't seen in years: his daughter furious at someone who isn't Nicolas.
He reads it. Doesn't push.
Inside, the cottage closes around me, every smell a small wound. Linseed oil from the studio, faint cedar of old floorboards. The hallway runs straight back: kitchen at the end, bedrooms right, living room left.
I go to my room first. Everything exactly as I left it.
The single bed, the dresser from when I was twelve, Maman's photograph on the nightstand.
Through the window, the heritage roses bloom on their arbor.
I unpack partially: the clothes from Gunner's closet, the small jewelry pouch, the leotard he bought me, which goes into the bottom drawer beside the original that has lived there for seven years.
Not everything. I'm not ready to know how long I'll actually be here.
Coming back down the hallway, I turn left into the living room.
The portrait pulls me up short.
Above the couch, myself at nineteen. Nicolas painted me in the back garden: late afternoon light, the heritage roses behind me, the mahogany tree in the corner, the studio's pale stucco wall at frame's edge.
I sit on the wooden bench Papa built in 1996, wearing a faded blue dress, hair down over one shoulder, looking past the painter at something beyond.
A bird, the sky, nothing. My eyes visible, my mouth at rest. The woman I was before the conservatory dismissed me, before Pristine became my cage.
I've walked past this painting ten thousand times. But now I see it with fresh eyes.
This is the painting Gunner saw that day.
The day he came for me, he was already in the cottage when I arrived home from Miss Macie's.
I found him standing beneath this very portrait, and we stood facing each other across the living room while my painted eyes watched from the wall.
Now I understand what I didn't then: this painting is what stopped him.
Made him look. Made him decide. The bougainvillea in the garden gave him the excuse to take me, but this portrait of me at nineteen, this is what made him want to keep me.
Two paintings by Nicolas. Both waiting for Gunner without knowing it. This portrait plus the garden painting that justified the kidnapping.
I pace through rooms that suddenly feel too small to contain this fury, this understanding that the man I love looked at my painted face and decided to take me after standing beneath it.
The portrait stays in my peripheral vision always, those painted eyes following me, before I finally sit on the couch beneath it.
At 2:18 PM, I pull out my phone and type: I am at my father's. Tell me why you really sent me away.
I hit send and wait, checking if he's read it, fighting not to type more.
The phone sits face-up beside my thigh on the couch.
Through the window, the lemon tree sways slightly in the afternoon breeze.
The ceiling fan turns lazy circles. Forty-three minutes is an eternity when you're waiting for a response from the man who pushed you away.
At 3:01 PM: You're safer there.
I read it twice. The operational voice, using safety as a cover for something else. My anger flares fresh.
Bullshit.
Twenty-eight minutes this time. I get up, walk to the kitchen, pour water, drink it standing at the sink. I return to the couch.
I want you away from all this.
What.
Not over text.
Then over the phone.
No.
The refusal is final, and I feel it close. He isn't pushing me away from the Hallstein danger.
I set the phone down and don't text for two hours.
I walk the cottage, trying not to think. But his voice, the paintings, Hallstein, it all keeps coming back to me. Gunner wants to end it, but in doing so, he's entering the kind of danger that could end with him dead in some Miami canal.
The anger doesn't disappear; it reorganizes around the love beneath it. I'm still furious that he sent me away, but I understand the motivation, at least.
At 5:34 PM, I pick up the phone again.
One day you'll push me away so far I won't come back.
The line hangs in the empty cottage, not about this afternoon but about everything we've been.
For forty days, Gunner has been the one refusing: refusing to look, to touch, to name what blazed between us.
I've been the one showing up: painting my body with his garden's flowers, dancing for him, kissing him first, letting him take me against the wall.
He's been pulling back while I've been stepping forward. Today is just his biggest pullback yet.
I set the phone down. He doesn't respond for an hour.
At 6:38 PM: I know.
I sit with those two words, not responding, until Nicolas comes in from the studio at 6:50 talking about dinner.
I cook the chicken with citrus and bay leaves that Maman taught me at eleven, rice with sofrito, a simple green salad.
The kitchen fills with garlic and lemon and butter, different from Sera's cooking, and I hadn't realized I'd missed it until now.
Nicolas opens the special occasion wine from the cabinet without comment, the bottle that's been waiting for a Sunday that didn't come.
At the small kitchen table with Maman's faded placemats, I tell him the edited version.
There's a man in Miami. His name is Gunner.
Runs security for a Cuban-American family's club.
I make his dangerous world sound almost ordinary.
We met through a job I don't specify. Been seeing him five weeks.
I'm in love with him. He sent me home because something dangerous is happening in his work this week.
What I don't tell: the kidnapping that started everything, the bougainvillea painting on Gunner's wall, this portrait's role in making him want me, the man who raped and killed six women, that I could be the next target, that I'm here because Gunner couldn't bear to risk losing me to his enemies.
Nicolas listens without pressing. Halfway through the meal, he says quietly, "Love changes the shape of a face. Yours has changed."
I register it without tears, staying focused on the table like I'm performing daughter-at-dinner the way Gunner performed boyfriend-through-texts.
After dishes, Nicolas kisses the top of my head at ten o'clock, his usual bedtime. He walks past the portrait without looking. Seven years on that wall have made it invisible to him. I sit on the couch in the half-light from the kitchen lamp, the painting above me in shadow.
At 11:45 PM, lying in my childhood bed with moonlight through the curtains, I text: Will you tell me when it's done.
One minute later, the fastest response all day: Yes.
He's been waiting for me. Been holding his phone.
Are you safe.
A long pause. Five minutes, maybe eight. The phone rests on my chest in the dark, and I imagine him doing something dangerous while I lie here.
Yes.
Don't lie.
I'm not lying.
I hold the phone against my cheek, the screen dark, the room dark, Nicolas asleep down the hall. Miami is ninety minutes south where Gunner sits in the apartment we shared. The cottage sheets smell like lavender and home, nothing like his sheets that smell of cedar and us.
I fall asleep around 1 AM with the phone still pressed to my cheek.
The next day passes in fragments. Coffee with Nicolas who doesn't ask questions. Walking the garden where Maman's roses bloom full on the arbor, the lemon tree heavy with fruit, the mahogany in the corner.
The day fractures itself along the axis of my phone, which I keep within arm's reach at all times. The air is thick with the chirr of cicadas and the scent of Nicolas's turpentine, but I am attuned only to the light vibration in my pocket or the ping of a new message.
At 8:54 AM: The garden is the same.
The reply doesn't come until 9:13. Nearly twenty minutes, though I count each one. Good. That's all he writes. The word is so bare, so stripped of comfort, it lands like a thumb pressed to a bruise.
I reread the last message, then type: I might go back to teaching tomorrow. I've missed it.
Eleven minutes later: No, you haven't.
He's right, and it stings. I imagine him in the Miami apartment, back pressed to the wall near the window, phone in his palm, reading me as easily from a distance as he ever did from two feet away.
I imagine the sound of his voice when he said my name, how even his silences felt like they contained a hundred unsaid things.
I am in the habit of lying to everyone, but with Gunner, the truth always scrapes to the surface.
At 10:47: I want you to be careful on Tuesday.
Four minutes, thirty-one seconds: I will be.
I take the phone outside, sit on the bench beneath the arbor where the roses have begun to turn brown at the edges, petals curling lightly like paper.
I scroll through old messages, absurdly desperate for more, for something.
I am dull with longing and boredom, two emotions I used to cure with movement—ballet center routines, the impossible reach for a perfect arabesque—but now I have only the stasis of waiting for him.
At 11:03: Don't make me wait long after.
Two minutes: I won't.
I want to write something witty, something to break the tension, but nothing comes.
My anger from yesterday is still there, but it's softened into a kind of ache.
There is a part of me that wants to throw the phone into the garden, another part that wants to call him over and over until he relents and picks up.
I eat lunch in silence, scrolling headlines, looking for news about the Hallstein appointment. In Miami, two people have already been shot outside the old stadium where Gunner said he sometimes ran the stairs at night. Every news story feels like a veiled threat.
I help Nicolas stretch a fresh canvas for a commission.
He staples the edges with the precision of an old master, forearms braced along the frame, and for a moment I remember being a small child, watching him paint Maman in the garden.
I remember her laughter, the way she held my hand when we crossed the street, the afternoons of baking together when the kitchen filled with citrus and cinnamon.
I wonder if this is how love always ends up: a series of absences you never get used to, but which shape every day after.
Finally, when I can't hold it back any longer, I type: Can't stop thinking of you.
The truth is I miss him so badly it feels like a fever, a physical thing spreading through my chest and limbs. I want to tell him I wish he was here, I wish he was safe, but I know it would only make his worry worse.
He just replies: Try.
I set the phone beside my fork at the dinner table.
Papa notices but says nothing. He serves the leftover chicken and rice, pours the last of the wine, and sits across from me.
The evening light gilds the kitchen and the dust motes in the air.
It is almost beautiful, but for the constant undertow of dread.
We talk about nothing. The garden, the neighbor's new dog, a town hall meeting that neither of us will attend. But every beat of conversation is shadowed by the phone, by the waiting, by the knowledge that at any moment everything could change. That Gunner might keep me waiting forever.