Chapter Twenty-Eight
Margo walked into the restaurant five minutes early.
Today, she wasn’t taking any chances. The sky was dark, a hint of snow in the air.
She moved a bit more gingerly than normal, the enormous bruise on her hip twinging in the cold, the concussion she’d received from Natalia’s assault leaving her with periodic bouts of dizziness.
Still, the doctors had finally released her, and Margo wouldn’t have missed today for anything in the world.
Margo gave her name to the host, and he led her toward the back where Bennett Baskin sat waiting for her, Greer absent this time.
Bennett rose to greet her, his gaze running over her appearance. “How are you faring?”
“Well enough, thank you,” Margo replied, wincing slightly as she slid into the seat he held out for her.
He sat back down. “I’m sorry for what you went through, sorry for the injuries you suffered.”
“Thank you.”
“I had my eye on a pair of chairs. French. Eighteenth century. Reportedly belonged to Louis XIV. I promise it’ll be boring in comparison. When you’re back to work, we should discuss your fee—if you’re interested in helping me source them, that is.”
Margo smiled. Admittedly, Bennett Baskin was sort of growing on her—there was something about him.
No doubt the fee for the Louis XIV chairs would be a bit higher than normal, his version of trying to make amends for all the trouble she’d gone through, not that it was his fault in the first place.
When she’d woken up in the hospital after the attack, the largest bouquet of flowers on her nightstand had been from him.
He meant well even if there was a brashness about him that seemed inclined to throw money at a problem.
And still, it was clear how important it was to have this connection with his grandmother.
Margo smiled. “You must be very excited to finally have your grandmother’s book. And to meet your cousin.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“You have the look about you. The one my clients get when they’ve been searching for something for a very long time and now it’s theirs.
It’s my favorite part of the job,” she confessed.
“It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it feels like there’s a bit of magic imbued in the objects I’m tasked to find, like they want to be found by the person who’s meant to have them.
They have these histories, these incredible journeys that they’ve been on.
Sometimes I think that if they could talk, well, what stories would they tell.
Your grandmother’s novel was like that.”
The restaurant host led two women toward their table.
Margo and Bennett rose at the same time, their attention laser-focused on the newcomers.
One woman was petite, her hair a mix of black and gray. She wore a simple black dress and minimal jewelry, a thin gold wedding band on her finger. A stylish and whimsical pair of black glasses were perched on her face.
She held a book in her hands.
After their own investigation and Luke calling in some favors from some American agents he’d worked on an Interpol case with, they’d finally tracked the real Pilar Castillo to a home in Key West. When Margo had explained who she was and told Pilar the story of everything that had happened, she’d been eager to board a plane to London.
The woman beside Pilar was the one who held Bennett’s full attention.
Margo studied them for a moment, the resemblance in the shape of their faces undeniable.
Evita Alfonso—Eva’s granddaughter.
None of them spoke, and then it was Pilar who broke the ice.
“You have your grandmother’s eyes,” Pilar said to Bennett. Her gaze drifted from Bennett to her friend Evita and back again.
Pilar and Margo hung back a bit as Evita and Bennett greeted each other, as the cousins embraced.
One of the first calls Luke and Margo had placed after Margo was released from the hospital was to tell Adriana Josephs that the book had been found and would soon be reunited with Eva’s family.
Adriana and Bennett had already connected and were making plans to see each other in Edinburgh.
She couldn’t help but think that Adriana would have loved this moment, seeing her grandmother Zenaida’s promise played out in such an emotional fashion.
When Evita and Bennett stepped back, Pilar handed A Time for Forgetting to Bennett.
“Your grandmother would have wanted you to have this.”
If Margo were a more fanciful person, she would have said that it felt like the book heaved a sigh of relief, as though it knew that it had traveled a very long distance to end up where it was meant to be. For a moment, Eva Fuentes was there with them.
Margo stared down at the book, a wave of sadness filling her as she thought of Mr. Thornton. He would have loved this, would have been moved to see the power that this one book had on the lives of so many.
Bennett’s fingers trembled slightly as he reached out and touched his grandmother’s book, reverence in his motions.
“I’m so sorry about your friend,” Pilar said to Margo.
“Thank you.” Curiosity got the best of Margo. “If you don’t mind me asking, whatever happened with the list of books Natalia Evans was after? She kept insisting that you had hidden it in this copy of A Time for Forgetting .”
“It’s still there. When it became clear that I was under suspicion, I hid the books. Everything happened so quickly, and I needed a temporary solution considering I had one of Fidel’s men living next door to me. I put the list in A Time for Forgetting.
“I had to flee Cuba. I’m sure Natalia told you about what happened with her father.”
“She did.”
“I went to see Eva the night I left. I entrusted the list to her. I was afraid that if something happened to me on the journey, the list would be lost forever. Some of the women in my building helped smuggle me out on a boat. I arrived in Key West and decided to stay there. It was close enough to Cuba that I still felt a connection there, but I no longer had to live with the constant fear of Fidel’s regime. ”
“The books are gone—the ones Natalia was searching for,” Evita interjected.
Pilar smiled beside her friend.
“Gone?” Margo asked.
Pilar nodded. “Yes. Returned to their owners. When I arrived in Key West, I started working as a librarian again. I knew that I would never remarry, would never have the life that I dreamed of when I was a young woman in Cuba. But I still needed a reason to go on, to endure. The books gave it to me. I made it my mission to reunite books with their exiled owners. There were others who were as passionate as I was. I had help—” Her gaze turned toward Bennett. “From Eva and Evita.”
“How?” he asked.
Evita smiled. “Our grandmother was the person I admired most in the world. She was a teacher in Cuba for all her life. She spoke fluent English, and she had spent some of her life in the United States. She taught me English. Back then—in the ’60s—Fidel was so concerned with courting international opinion, with highlighting Cuba’s position to give legitimacy to his regime.
His arrogance was a flaw we were able to exploit.
I traveled to the United States because I was a respected teacher, meant to represent the best of Cuba.
Our grandmother inspired me. Her years living under Spanish rule taught her to subvert the regime without doing so overtly.
And so, Pilar and I were able to meet, become friends, and I would bring books when I could.
Pilar would then return them to their rightful owners who had fled Cuba.
We did this for four years, until Eva died, until I decided to leave Cuba. ”
“Eva’s book saved me. And then Eva and Evita helped save the books that were given to me for safekeeping,” Pilar said.
“That’s incredible,” Margo said. “All that you did. All that you risked.”
“Given the bravery of so many of my countrymen, I can’t say that it always felt like enough,” Pilar replied. “But we did what we could.”
“You did a great deal,” Bennett interjected.
“Natalia Evans was Cuban intelligence, wasn’t she?” Margo asked.
“She was,” Pilar confirmed. “She came to London to spy for the Cuban government and then married a British man. It sounds like there’s some diplomatic question about what to do with her.
What she did—infiltrating the exile circles like that, pretending that her family had suffered losses when really she worked for the regime—
“It’s hard to know who you can trust anymore. It was like that in Cuba in those days. Worse. We constantly looked over our shoulder, spoke in whispers for fear that someone would betray us to the regime. They took my husband. Killed him.”
“I’m sorry.”
Pilar’s free hand drifted to the gold band on her ring finger. “That was around the time that your grandmother’s novel came to me,” she said to Bennett.
“Would you like me to tell you about her?” Evita asked.
Bennett’s eyes swam with unshed tears. “Please.”
—
Margo walked out of the restaurant, leaving Pilar, Evita, and Bennett still talking at the table.
She pulled out her phone, dying to tell Luke all about what had happened.
She stopped in her tracks.
Luke leaned against the metal railing. When he saw her, he smiled, his entire face lighting up with emotion, and something twisted itself up inside her as he pushed off from the railing and made his way toward her.
“How are you feeling? I talked to Bea, and she told me you were here. I wanted to come by and check on you.”
“I’m okay. My head hurts a bit, but it’s not too bad.”
“How did it go in there?”
“It was powerful to see them together like that. And the book with them. I think Eva would have been pleased.”
“You did good.”