Chapter 135
AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCE ENDED, Teo took one of the tours, and Mary Lou put me in charge of collecting folders.
While I wandered up and down the emptying rows of chairs, I watched Paul talking first to the vice admiral and then the ambassador.
I was waiting for one of these men to tell him he couldn’t treat a journalist whom they had invited onto the Gilmore with such blatant disrespect, but as I drew closer I realized he was, in fact, being showered with compliments.
Volpe was using words like thorough and robust, and Vaughan was nodding along, and by the time I’d finished collecting the folders, the Jenkinses were up at the front praising Paul, too.
“Here are the folders,” I said to Mary Lou.
“Thanks so much,” she said, then prompted me to congratulate Paul, too. “Didn’t your husband do a wonderful job?”
Paul wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
“Yes,” I said, as much to Mary Lou as to Paul. “It was very… educational.”
I stuck around for a little while, waiting to see if Teo would resurface, but somehow we’d lost each other. “Did you see Teo leave?” I asked Bruno, who was talking to a colleague of his from the Rome office.
He nodded. “A little while ago.”
On the boat ride back to La Maddalena, I tried to puzzle out why Teo would leave without saying goodbye to me. It was all I could think about, really. That and whether his plan had been to go directly back to Sassari. I regretted not asking him.
“Do you want to grab lunch?” Laura asked as we walked to our cars, but I told her I was beat and asked for a rain check.
“Yeah, sure,” she said, and we gave each other a quick hug goodbye, then got into our separate cars.
I didn’t go anywhere right away. Instead, I waited for Laura and some of the other wives to pull out of the parking lot. When the pier had cleared out, I took a deep breath and pointed the Chevelle in the direction of Francesca’s apartment building.