Epilogue - Santiago
One week earlier
The girl has been swimming for forty minutes, and she is not going to make it on her current line.
I stand at the rail of the west terrace with the night glasses and watch her fight the crosscurrent off the point.
She doesn't know about the current. People who learn to swim in pools never do.
She's correcting the wrong way, spending herself against water that will carry her past the channel markers and out toward nothing, and there is a version of tonight where I stand here and watch the Atlantic solve a problem I didn't know I had.
I lift the radio instead.
"Fall in behind her. Lights off. If she goes under, take her. If she doesn't, shepherd her — wide wake on her left until she's inside the harbor line."
"And if she sees us?"
"She won't. She hasn't seen anything in two days."
Below, the chase boat slides out of the boathouse dark and settles into her blind side, patient as I am, and together we escort Juliet Price off my island.
Serrano called it in the moment her charter crossed the reef line.
Fifty-one hours ago. An unscheduled boat is a phone call; a trespasser is a short conversation and a long swim with weights.
That is the arithmetic of Bacanao, and everyone from Key West to Caracas knows the arithmetic, which is why nobody comes.
Then Serrano sent the photograph, and I stopped doing arithmetic.
Blonde. Silk blouse and designer jeans, dressed for a marina brunch, standing on my sand with her hands in fists like a child who has marched into the sea to slap it.
I know her at once. La Sirena, months ago.
The one soft thing in a building of knives — the girl the Delgado dogs pulled me off of before the evening got interesting.
I remember the exact temperature of her fear.
Most fear is noise. Hers was music, and underneath it, buried where even she couldn't hear it, there was a low note of something else.
Rage, maybe. Something with teeth, wearing a princess costume. I told her I'd remember her.
I keep my promises. It's the only honest thing about me.
"Orders?" Serrano asked.
"Nothing," I said. "Nobody goes near her. Nobody is seen. Pull the patrols off the south shore and give her the island."
He didn't ask why. He's paid not to. If he had asked, I'm not certain what I would have told him, because I want to see what she does is not a sentence men in my position are supposed to need.
The captain was simpler. Ortega's crew met his boat before it cleared the shallows, and the man made every correct decision very quickly, the way charter captains do.
His boat is in my boathouse now. He is on my payroll now, at a salary that buys forgetting, and if the arrangement troubles him, he has been wise enough to be troubled about it quietly, somewhere I can't see. Hugo understands the arithmetic.
So: two days.
Two days of the pretty girl from La Sirena creeping around my island trying to work up the courage to knock on my door.
I watched her on the cameras and, when the cameras bored me, from the tree line, close enough to hear her talking herself into it.
You can do this. He's just a man. Rehearsing her confrontation to the palm trees like an actress with terrible stage fright.
Marching halfway up the path to the compound — she made it to the third bend on the second morning, farther than most armed men get — and then turning around, and hating herself for it. Her hatred came off her like heat.
She slept in the groundskeeper's shed. I had Marta stock it the first evening — water, food, the blanket left folded on the shelf as if it had always lived there — because a dead trespasser is a phone call but this one, I found, I wanted alive.
She drank my water and ate my food and never once asked herself why a toolshed on a private island was provisioned like a guest room.
Trusting. Or desperate. On her, the two look alike, and both look like an invitation.
Here is what interests me, and I have been turning it over for two days the way you turn a coin you suspect is rare:
She came to me.
Not sent. Not sold. Not dragged. The little Price sister — the one her family folded itself in half to keep out of our world, the one a Rosetti marriage was purchased to protect — chartered a boat with her own money and pointed it at the most dangerous address in Florida because I frightened her, and she'd decided to make it stop.
It's the worst plan I have ever seen. It's the bravest thing I've watched a civilian do.
On the cameras her hands shook the entire time, every hour of every day, and she stayed anyway.
Fear is common. I farm it; I know its every grade. Fear that walks toward — that, I have seen perhaps twice in my life.
She reaches the harbor line a little before four. The chase boat peels away in the dark, unseen, unthanked. I set down the glasses.
On the sand where she started, her shoes are still sitting where she stepped out of them — placed together, neatly, heels aligned, because even fleeing for her life the girl is polite.
Strappy, absurd, built for marble and champagne, salt-stained now.
I carry them up to the house myself. I don't examine why.
In my study I set them on the shelf that holds nothing else, and the room reorganizes itself around them.
Somewhere across three miles of black water, she is dragging herself onto a dock, deciding she failed.
Deciding she's a coward. She'll carry that back to her sister and her borrowed family and her bright, managed little life, and none of them will ever know she spent two days living in the palm of my hand, breathing because I found her breathing interesting.
She thinks no one saw.
I saw everything.
And I've decided something, standing here in the small hours with her shoes on my shelf and the taste of her fear still organizing my thoughts.
Any man on my payroll could take her. A car, a boat, a needle — an afternoon's work.
But you don't steal a thing like that. Theft is for objects, and she is not an object.
No. A thing like that, you make the world give you.
Formally. In writing. With her family's hands on the pen and nowhere for anyone to run — least of all her.
It will take patience. I am nothing but patience wearing a suit.
Pretty girl, I told her once. I'll remember you.
I keep my promises.
Thank you so much for reading Adrian and Isa’s story!