Chapter 24 #3
I think about Tyler and what I know. I know that he leaves wet towels on the bed.
I know that he eats cereal at eleven p.m. and leaves the bowl in the sink.
I know that he loves me in the way you love a lamp, or a couch, or the exact right temperature of your shower.
Present. Functional. And totally uninspiring.
“Sometimes knowing is worse,” I say. “Because then you can’t pretend.
” I look at the olive groves outside, the long rows of silver-green trees planted with a patience I’ve never had in my own life.
“I spend a lot of time trying to make other people happy. Tyler. My boss. Everyone. Melissa says I should go to therapy.”
Rodrigo smiles— a real one, the kind that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes him look like someone you'd want to tell your whole life story to over a very long dinner.
“Sometimes life itself is therapy, sí? It teaches us something new every day.” He tilts his head. “People teach us the most, no?”
I open my mouth to answer and realize I don’t have one.
“Perhaps,” Rodrigo continues. “You would let me get to really know you, Billie. Perhaps you would let me be your friend, without rushing into things— as it seems you are still— involved.”
“I would like that,” I agree, secretly relieved, but also… unsure. From what I’ve seen of Rodrigo, knowing him will only make me want him more. But being a friend to the man isn’t cheating on Tyler. I’m allowed to have friends.
“I owe you an apology,” he says, and his voice shifts to something more serious.
“At the baby shower. I was cold to you. I know how it must have seemed. But I was trying to warn you— about Alana. About what she is. I couldn’t say it plainly because she was right there, and I didn’t know how to tell a stranger that the woman she just met is—” he gestures vaguely— “what Alana is.”
I laugh. It comes out before I can stop it— a real laugh, involuntary and bright. “I thought you didn’t like me,” I say. “I thought you were this brooding, rude guy who couldn’t even smile at a baby shower.”
Rodrigo looks at me. His eyes are warm and brown and reflect back at me the entire emotional vocabulary of lovers across the world.
“You were very wrong about that,” he says.
His hand moves under the table. His fingers brush against my knee— not grabbing, not holding, just touching— and the contact sends a current through me that starts at my knuckles and ends somewhere behind my sternum, and I don’t pull away.
Then, because he’s apparently decided I’ve had enough emotional intensity for one thirty-second interval, he leans back and the corner of his mouth tilts upward.
“Also,” he says, “I should point out, only as a friend of course— Alana has technically broken up with Tyler for you. By text. Which means, technically, you are a single woman sitting in a dining car with a single man on a train through Spain.” He raises his coffee cup. “Technically.”
I laugh again. Louder this time, the kind of laugh that turns a head two tables over. “How are we supposed to be friends if you continually point out that I’m single?”
“I am a creative person,” Rodrigo smirks.
“I paint, remember? I’m sure we will find a way.
” He sets down his cup and his voice lowers.
He looks around as if to make sure we’re not being overhead.
“Billie, I have a family home in the Tuscan countryside— outside of a small village, quiet, safe. My cousin Benny is there. He’s a degenerate,” he adds, with familial affection, “but he’s loyal, and he knows the area, and the Ledger doesn’t know about the house.
We must get a message to Melissa. We will tell her to meet us there. Just you and me.”
I picture it without meaning to. A stone house in the Tuscan countryside. Olive trees. Quiet mornings. Rodrigo painting at an easel while I sit nearby reading a book.
But then I think about Tyler— real Tyler, back in Chicago, who may or may not know I’ve been kidnapped, who may or may not care— and the guilt returns, thick and complicated.
I should have a real conversation with him.
A real ending, if it’s going to be an ending.
Not a text Alana wrote from my stolen phone.
And yet.
I look at Rodrigo, whose eyes are still on me with that steady, unhurried attention that I am not used to receiving from anyone, and I think: is this real?
Or is this the adrenaline and the danger and the foreign country and the blazer that makes me feel like someone else?
Am I falling for this man, or am I falling for the version of myself that exists near him— the one who negotiated with arms dealers and jumped out of a moving car and is currently sitting in a Spanish dining car deciding what she wants instead of what everyone else needs?
And is he really falling for me, or just the idea of me?
I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know. And the not-knowing terrifies me more than the compound did, more than Alana and her drugged drinks and her thrown phones, because the compound had clear stakes and a clear exit, and this— whatever this is— has neither.
But those eyes.
“We’ll get to the house in the countryside,” I agree.
Rodrigo nods back at me, and that much, at least: is decided.