Chapter 7
A dragging agitation pulled at Lora as she left city hall and hiked back up to the B and B.
And while some of it could have been the heat of the afternoon settling on her skin, there was no denying that she was utterly gobsmacked with the news that she was going to have to “live” in Baia Santa as a real resident.
She crashed into the cottage to find Vilmari scrolling comfortably from a pillow, and though Lora didn’t want to disrupt her chill, in only a few minutes, she found herself ranting about everything Andrea had told her.
“And on top of it, he said I need to learn Italian.” Lora flung her arm behind her on the bed. She was lying down with her legs up the wall against the headboard while Vilmari curled in a cloud of white sheets on her bed.
“Well, you do,” she said. Lora shot her a look.
“Don’t look at me like that. I got the same comments from my cousins every time we went down to Puerto Rico.
Just because I grew up with some slang and know how to make arroz con gandules didn’t mean I could speak Spanish.
I learned, same as anyone else. It was tough, but look—I write one hundred percent in Spanish now, and not even my editors can tell that I couldn’t conjugate a tostón before. ”
“I can learn, I know. To be honest, that’s the least of my worries. But how am I going to find a place to live and make it look like someone actually lives there in only a few days? I have some money saved, but you know I don’t have enough to set up a European pied-à-terre.”
“He said that the police come to your house? Do they stand at the door, or do they have to be invited in like vampires?”
“I don’t know if they come all the way inside. What if they check the bathroom for toothbrushes or open the fridge to see how long you’ve kept the yogurt?”
“I think that would be considered less of a residency visit and more execution of a search warrant,” said Vilmari.
“Let’s hope,” Lora said, swinging her legs around to sit upright against the pillows. “Apparently everything is different here.”
“Even you. You’re normally as cool as a cucumber, but something has you rattled.”
“He asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this!” She still could not believe it.
Did she seem like someone who would change her mind after getting hit with a challenge?
Her whole life had been a series of challenges, from figuring out how to fly under the radar so her school wouldn’t know that she was home alone most nights while Pamela worked to scraping money together for clothing, books, and shoes.
During her first year in New York, she worked at two restaurants and a coffee shop to pay her rent, often only sleeping three or four hours between one job and the other.
And when the doctor told them that Pamela had cancer, the only time she cried was out of sheer frustration when she’d had to fight with the insurance company about paying for the chemotherapy treatments.
She could handle challenges. “Like I woke up one morning and casually decided to move to a foreign country and take on a multiyear research project—who would ask that?”
“Maybe he was trying to be helpful,” said Vilmari, rolling onto her back. “I know this is important, but I also know this solves a few problems for you too.”
“It’s true that making the choice to go to Switzerland solves a couple of issues, but you know I wouldn’t be doing it for just that.
” Lora knew she was talking about Charlie.
It was crazy to think their relationship started off so innocently, like the perfect meet-cute of an opposites-attract rom-com.
She’d met him when she got called in for jury duty.
Though it wasn’t his case, he happened to be sitting in the back of the courtroom, waiting to speak to the judge.
She’d been desperate to know the best way to get out of it, and since he looked lawyer-ish in his windowpane-checked suit, she asked him for advice.
Charlie told her exactly what to say in order to seem as unappealing a juror as possible, and when she was dismissed, he had waited for her at the exit to ask her to have coffee with him.
He’d been sweet and self-deprecating, joking that he had the taste buds of a nine-year-old, and had ordered a hot chocolate.
On their way out of the café, he’d knelt down and given whosagoodboy ear scruffs to an adorably hideous boxer and promptly melted her heart.
It was only on their second date that she found out who he was, that his family owned half of the Upper East Side, and their kind of people did things like avoiding summer traffic on the Long Island Expressway by taking a helicopter or hiring David Chang to come over and make bo ss?m.
Her plan was to ghost him after that. In her mind, there was no way they would have anything in common.
But then he’d been so sweet, so persuasive.
He would make fun of himself for the way he was raised and go out of his way to make sure she felt comfortable around his family.
Instead of being convinced that they didn’t belong together, she found herself being convinced that maybe they could.
When word got out that Charlie’s father and uncle had manipulated some data to win a big contract for their metals and mining businesses, he’d assured her that it was nothing—a misunderstanding in a family business that he wasn’t a part of—and it would be old news in a few days.
She didn’t recognize the sound of a snapping shutter and therefore didn’t know she’d been photographed leaving his apartment until Vilmari called to tell her about the photos in the Post. The headline, “Scandal Scion’s Son Spending Summer with Student,” was clearly crafted to make it seem like she was some twenty-year-old college kid who’d been having an affair with the lecherous Hammersley heir.
As much as Lora knew that part wasn’t true, she couldn’t excuse the rest.
She’d given Charlie the chance to distance himself from the mess.
And although she didn’t want to believe it, there were only so many reporters she could ignore and news she could pretend to not hear before she had to accept reality.
How could she have let herself believe otherwise?
It was upsetting to think that she couldn’t trust her own judgment.
The final straw, of course, was when she was brought in for questioning by the FBI like she was in a different kind of movie altogether.
The actual FBI. With two actual FBI agents who sat across the table from Lora in a shitty office building wearing shitty navy-blue suits and asked her to talk about everything she knew regarding Charlie and his family from the second she met him up until that morning.
Of course she knew nothing. Charlie had kept her completely in the dark—a fact that she wasn’t sure if she should be grateful for or embarrassed by.
The agents seemed to give up early when it was clear that she didn’t know anything about the Hammersleys except that they threw big dinner parties and sometimes hid the good scotch from the guests.
Lora walked out feeling like they pitied her more than anything.
Still, the press kept hounding, and now there were even paparazzi to contend with.
When the opportunity in Zurich appeared, it seemed perfect.
She could get away, get out from under the mess, and go back to focusing on her own life—the one she’d fought to build on her own.
There was just one tiny obstacle to overcome.
“I know you’re not just running away. I’m only saying that you can’t blame the guy for asking.” Vilmari smiled, stretching her arms up over her head.
“Fine, but you know that I want this so badly. I can’t think about staying in New York.
I don’t want to. Gaining citizenship is literally the only thing in my way, so I have to get it out of my way and everything will be fine.
” She’d thought about whether it would be possible to stay in New York and get a gig as an adjunct professor or on another professor’s research team.
But that would mean fending off journalists and Charlie, having to get a second or even a third job, probably moving farther out of the city, and definitely not getting any closer to having health insurance.
In Switzerland, she’d have an apartment, a stipend, access to health care, and the right to apply for the research funds to make her dreams come true—all on her own.
“OK, OK.” Vilmari turned onto her back. She was quiet for a moment. “I still think you can resolve all of this and also think the mayor’s cute.”
“I’m trying to be frustrated!” Lora grabbed an accent cushion and launched it at Vilmari. “Don’t throw me off.”
“Hey!” she cried, blocking the cushion. “I’m just saying that if this whole thing is going to be complicated, why not let it be complicated with a little side of the sexy Superman?
You don’t have to turn it into something permanent.
Consider it a vacation romance. You know, make a memory that keeps you warm when you’re freezing your chichis off this winter in Iceland. ”
“Switzerland,” Lora corrected.
“Same thing.”
“I don’t have time for sexy,” said Lora, waving her arm.
“And there’s where you’re wrong, Lor,” Vilmari said. “There’s always time for sexy.”