Chapter 3 #2
The wind hadn't let up by the next evening, if anything it had gotten worse, shoving at the bike the whole ride down to the harbor until I gave up and parked it, walking the last stretch with my jacket collar up against the grit blowing off the road.
The Anchor's blue awning was snapping hard enough that Marta had lashed it down with rope, and half the shutters along the harbor front were latched tight, the whole town folded in on itself against the heat.
Isla was already at the bar when I arrived, and the second she saw me, something in her posture changed — shoulders back, chin up, the whole performance sliding into place like a coat she'd practiced putting on.
She smiled at me like she meant it. I smiled back the same way.
It should have felt more like acting than it did.
"There he is," Marta said, appearing from behind the bar with the specific energy of a woman who had been waiting all day for this exact moment and intended to extract maximum value from it.
She was somewhere north of sixty, built like she could still win a bar fight if the occasion called for it, and she looked at me the way you'd look at a fish you were deciding whether to keep or throw back. "So you're the one."
"Apparently."
"Roman," Isla said, sliding a hand into mine, warm and steady, "this is Marta. She's known me since I was six and will absolutely interrogate you, so I'd recommend just answering honestly."
"I generally do," I said, and Marta's eyebrows went up like that was already a point in my favor, or possibly against it, it was hard to tell.
"How'd you two meet," Marta said, no preamble, planting both hands on the bar like she was settling in for a deposition.
"Right here, actually," I said. "Three weeks back. I was in town about some business on the coast road, stopped in for a drink, and this one—" I nodded at Isla "—knocked a full glass of red wine straight down my sleeve reaching for a napkin."
"That is not what happened," Isla said, with such convincing outrage that for a second even I second-guessed the story we'd built together. "You bumped the table. I was defending myself."
"I did not bump the table."
"You absolutely bumped the table, and then you had the nerve to lecture me about the tannins staining faster on cotton than linen, like I asked for a lesson in fabric care in the middle of an apology."
"Because you weren't listening to the apology, you were too busy trying to blot it with ice, which, for the record, only sets a stain, it doesn't lift it."
"He's very particular," Isla told Marta, with the long-suffering air of a woman who'd apparently been living with this particular grievance for weeks instead of the ninety seconds it had actually existed. "I found out about a week later he alphabetizes his tools."
"I do not alphabetize my tools."
"He organizes them by function and then alphabetically within each function," Isla said, without missing a beat, and I felt something in my chest do an unfamiliar thing at how easily the detail had come to her, invented on the spot and somehow more convincing than anything we'd actually rehearsed.
Marta looked between the two of us for a long moment, arms crossed, weighing the story the way she'd clearly weighed a thousand harbor rumors before it, sorting truth from performance with the practiced eye of someone who'd been doing it her whole life.
"Huh," she said finally.
"Huh good, or huh bad?" Isla asked.
"Huh, I believe you," Marta said, and something in Isla's shoulders eased, just slightly, just enough that I noticed. "Mostly because nobody would invent a lie that boring on purpose. A wine stain and alphabetized tools. If you two were making it up, you'd have picked something more romantic."
"We're not the romantic type," I said.
"Clearly," Marta said, already turning to grab glasses off the shelf, "which is exactly why I believe every word of it.
" She set two glasses down harder than strictly necessary.
"Drinks are on the house tonight. Congratulations, or condolences, depending on how the wind's blowing when the wedding actually happens. "
She moved off down the bar to harangue another customer about something, and Isla let out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding, her hand still loosely laced in mine on the bar top, neither of us in any particular hurry to let go.
"The tool thing was good," I said quietly.
"I panicked. It just came out."
"It was better than anything I had planned."
"High praise, from the man who plans everything." She glanced sideways at me, something warm and unguarded flickering across her face before she visibly caught it and reeled it back in. "We should get a drink. For the performance."
"For the performance," I agreed, and neither of us moved to let go of the other's hand while Marta poured, and the wind howled against the shuttered windows like it had opinions about that too.
We stayed longer than the assignment strictly required.
That was the part I noted, later, riding back up the coast road with the sirocco shoving at the bike the whole way — that there had been no tactical reason to stay for a second round, no audience left to convince once Marta had wandered off satisfied, and yet we'd stayed anyway, trading real conversation across the bar top about nothing in particular, her laugh coming easier with every exchange, mine coming easier than it had in longer than I wanted to admit.
By the time I dropped her back at the villa, the wind had scoured the sky clear of stars, nothing but dark and noise and the smell of salt and crushed lemon leaves everywhere at once.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked, hand on the door, hair whipping loose around her face despite every effort she'd made to tame it that evening.
"For the performance," I said.
"Right," she said. "For the performance."
Neither of us moved for a second longer than the sentence required, and then she was gone inside, the door shutting hard against the wind, and I stood in the drive a long moment before I remembered I had somewhere else to be.
The ride back gave me too much time to think, which is usually when I do my best work and, apparently, also my most dangerous.
I ran the numbers the way I always did — the road secured, the will's timeline on track, Marta's approval banked, the whole plan proceeding exactly as designed. Every column added up clean.
Except for the one variable I hadn't built into the spreadsheet at all: the fact that somewhere in the last two weeks, convincing everyone else had stopped being the hard part, and convincing myself had quietly become a full-time job I hadn't clocked in for.
I told myself that was just the sirocco talking. The wind made everyone strange for a few days every summer, Isla had said so herself. It would blow through, and clear out, and everything would go back to the clean arithmetic I'd built this whole arrangement on.
I didn't entirely believe it. But I was, if nothing else, patient enough to wait and see.
Reaper texted me before I'd even made it back to the clubhouse.
Marta's already telling people you two are the real thing.
Nice work. I read it twice, sitting on the idling bike outside the gate, wind still hauling grit across the yard, and found I had no clean answer for whether "nice work" was the compliment he meant it to be, or a warning I wasn't ready yet to hear.
I put the phone away without answering, and sat there a while longer, letting the wind do its work on whatever certainty I'd walked into this arrangement with, wondering how long a man could keep calling something a business deal before the deal itself stopped believing him.