Chapter 3
chapter three
mia
By morning, I am back in the hospital lounge after three hours in a hotel room I do not remember entering.
My name has not yet become searchable. This is the only mercy Monaco is offering me before Matteo appears in the lounge doorway and says, "He's asking for you."
I have been sitting with yesterday's folder on my knee and a coffee I stopped tasting an hour ago. Outside, the harbour turns gold and unnecessary, the yachts already perfectly positioned, the hills already perfectly lit. The whole scene appears untroubled by the fact that somewhere at the bottom of the hill, a photographer has a picture of a woman who came here with a stranger’s name on a folder.
"He's conscious?" I say.
"For hours. Coherent. Asks good questions." Matteo's face does something careful. "He is asking for you. Not the lawyer. Not me. You."
"Before the physicians do their rounds," I say.
"Yes."
I look at Matteo. Matteo looks back with the diplomacy of a man who has managed a world-famous racing driver for eleven years and learned, somewhere in that time, when to stop elaborating.
"Five minutes," I say.
The corridor to his room is not what I expected.
Pale stone and controlled light and two men in Vega Motorsport lanyards standing near the elevator who stop their conversation when Matteo passes and do not resume it.
A woman in reception — hotel-level, not hospital-level, which tells me what category of money is keeping this building running — glances at the folder in my hand and away again, too fast, which means she already knows who it's for.
At the door, Matteo stops.
"He may seem more coherent than he is," he says. "The pain medication?—"
"I'll manage," I say.
He opens the door.
The room is different with him awake in it.
I register that before I register anything else — the shift in atmosphere, the change that happens to a space when the person at its centre has their eyes open. Yesterday, the room had the quality of a vigil. Now it feels like an audience.
He is propped against the headboard, the cervical brace holding him very still in the controlled way of someone who has decided that stillness is a choice rather than a restriction. He is in a hospital gown. This should make him look diminished. It does not.
Injured men are supposed to look breakable. Sebastián Carras looked interrupted.
He could not turn his head. Somehow, that made his attention worse. It had nowhere to go except directly forward, and I was in that line, and the steadiness of it landed in my sternum before I'd taken more than two steps into the room.
I feel it there. Not a flutter, not anything soft — a kind of pressure, the same sensation you get stepping into a room where something important has already been decided.
"Ms. Callahan," he says.
His voice is lower than the one I heard in the onboard footage yesterday. Rougher with sleep and pain and however many hours he'd been awake. There is an accent underneath the English — not thick, not softened, just present.
The way he says my name is not remarkable. But my breath changes anyway, and I note this the way you note an unfamiliar physical symptom: with professional suspicion and the intention to address it later.
I stop at a reasonable distance. Professional distance.
"Mr. Carras," I say.
He looks at me like I am evidence he has not finished reading — not hostile, but thorough.
"You came," he says.
"You put my name on a legal document. Coming was the minimum."
Something passes through his expression. Not quite a smile — more like something that considered completing itself and chose not to. He tilts his chin toward the chair beside the bed, which pulls at whatever runs between his neck and shoulder, and I watch him decide not to react to that.
I sit.
"I have three questions," I say.
"I assumed you would."
"First. Do I know you?"
"No."
"Have we met?"
"No." A pause. "Not in a way that counts."
I note that and move on, because that particular answer is a door I'm not opening yet.
"Second. Are the documents legal? All thirty-seven?"
"Yes. My solicitor can provide?—"
"I've already spoken to your solicitor. I verified three jurisdictions last night." I look at him steadily. "I'm asking you."
He meets it without flinching. "They're legal."
"Third." I have been carrying this since Gatwick, since Nice, since I sat in this building last night watching harbour lights. "Why me?"
The room is quiet.
He looks at me for a long moment — not stalling, not the particular restlessness of someone searching for a comfortable version of the truth. Actually thinking, the way people think when the real answer exists and they are deciding how much of it they can give at once.
A knock at the door.
"Mr. Carras." A nurse, appearing at the threshold. "The physician will be?—"
"Five minutes," he says.
Not loud. Not rude. The temperature of a man who has said this before, in different rooms, with different variables, and has never yet found it necessary to raise his voice.
She leaves.
I look back at him. He is watching me notice this, which is worse than if he'd been looking elsewhere.
"The third question," I say. "You were about to answer it."
"I was about to tell you," he says, "that it's going to take longer than you have before the physicians come in."
"I have time."
"You have nineteen minutes," he says.
He still cannot see a clock from where he is lying. The brace is still holding him fixed. I have no idea how he has arrived at nineteen minutes and I have, against all reasonable professional judgement, no doubt that he is correct.
"Not for this," he says. "Not in nineteen minutes." He holds my look with the steadiness of a man who is aware of the impression it creates and has decided to let it. "Come back."
"I'm supposed to be in London."
"I know."
"Mr. Carras. I came to Monaco to authorize treatment for a stranger. The treatment is authorized. My professional obligation?—"
"I know you left something unfinished to come here," he says. "I know what it cost."
The room does something quiet and significant.
I should find that alarming. I do find it alarming. The problem is that my body understands it differently — there is a particular warmth that comes from being closely observed by someone who has done their observing carefully, and I am experiencing it right now, and it is inconvenient.
"How do you know that?" I say.
"Matteo," he says. Simply. "He's thorough."
"You instructed Matteo to research me."
"I instructed Matteo," he says, "to know whose hands my life was in."
There is something in that sentence that lands differently than I expect. I choose not to examine it immediately. I choose, instead, the safer ground.
"So we can discuss the part where you gave me legal authority over your spine without asking me," I say, "or you can tell me what I need to know before I fly home."
"Tomorrow," he says.
"I have a job, Mr. Carras."
"I know that too." Again, the simple acknowledgement — not a threat, not a negotiation, just a fact he is in possession of. "One more day."
"One more day," I say. "And then you tell me everything."
"And then I tell you," he says, "what's mine to tell."
It is not a full commitment. He knows that I know it. I look at him for a moment, this man who cannot turn his head in my direction and is somehow still commanding the room, and I think: this is going to be a problem.
I stand. I straighten my jacket. I pick up the folder — his name, my handwriting, all of this still technically part of a day I am not finished with.
"We need to discuss the other thirty-six documents," I say.
"Tomorrow," he says.
"Tomorrow," I say.
The corridor gives me nothing. Pale stone, controlled light, the Vega lanyards back at their post by the elevator, Matteo waiting at a distance that is either respectful or tactical and is probably both.
I make it to the lounge.
I sit down very carefully on the nearest available surface.
My hands are not entirely steady, which I am choosing to attribute to the coffee and the hour and the fact that I have not slept properly and most definitely not to the nineteen minutes I just spent in a room with a man who looked at me like I was a problem he had already solved.
My phone buzzes. Priya.
How is the man you've never met?
Coherent, I type. More than I expected.
That is not what I asked.
She is, as usual, correct.
I am still deciding what the correct answer is when her next message arrives.
Not a text.
An image.
Me, yesterday afternoon, walking through the hospital entrance. Folder open at my side, his name visible on the label, his name visible on the tab, his name in my handwriting in a photograph that a stranger has taken and posted before I even knew where to look.
My stomach drops before my mind catches up.
Below the photograph, she has written four words.
Mia. How fast can you get out.
I look at the photograph for a long time.
Then I look down the corridor toward the room I have just left, and toward the man in it who asked me to come back tomorrow with the calm certainty of someone who already knew I would, and I think: the problem is not that he is probably right.
The problem is that my name was private yesterday and public this morning, and I agreed to stay anyway.