Chapter 2
Mila
I lay awake that first night cataloguing everything wrong with Rafael "Knox" whatever-his-surname-was, and the list was long, and not one item on it should have kept me awake.
He was running a play. I'd named it to his face and he hadn't even bothered to deny it, which was its own kind of play — the disarming honesty move, you caught me, isn't that charming.
He'd been sent. He led with warmth. He'd brought me to the old man's coffee bar because it was the most photogenic heartstring in the harbor.
He'd given me a speech that was clearly his best material, the one about asking the man instead of pricing the boat, and he'd delivered it like he meant it, which is the whole skill, isn't it, the meaning-it.
I'd handled a hundred men like him. I knew the shape of the threat. A charmer is just a lever looking for a fulcrum, and I don't have one. I'm all surface. There's nothing to get under.
At least that was the theory I'd lived by for fifteen years, and it had never once failed me, because I had never once let a man stay near me long enough to test it.
You keep moving, you keep the verdict cold, you leave before the leaving can be done to you.
That had been the whole architecture of my life.
It had kept me safe and it had kept me alone and I had long ago stopped being able to tell those two things apart.
So why was I awake at two in the morning with the shutters open to the heat, replaying the exact moment his speech had landed?
Because it had landed. That was the trouble. For one second, by the zinc counter, he'd reached past the arithmetic and put his finger on the one thing I never let anyone touch.
You ask the man.
I'd asked the man. I'd asked my father why he stayed until the asking became a thing we didn't do anymore, a sore we walked around. And Rafael had no way of knowing that, no way of knowing he'd swung blind and hit the exact bone, and the fact that he'd hit it by luck didn't make it hurt less.
I got up and drank water at the window. The town was black and silent, the heat sitting over it like a lid. Down at the harbor, The Anchor had gone dark, but I could see one light still burning at the seaward end, and I wondered, stupidly, if it was his.
Then I told myself to stop, and I went back to bed, and I did not sleep, and in the morning I went to work with a vengeance.
A vengeance is a useful thing to bring to work.
It keeps your hand steady and your eye cold.
If I couldn't stop thinking about him, I could at least out-work the thinking, bury it under so many counted boats and copied notices that there was no room left in the day for the memory of a man's voice saying you ask the man like he had a right to my history.
Here is what I do, when I do my job properly. I disappear.
Not literally. I walk the place in plain sight.
But I stop being Mila-the-writer-from-Calder and I become a kind of absence with a notebook, a thing people talk past and around, and if you hold still long enough and ask the right small questions, a town tells you what it is when it thinks no one's keeping score.
I kept score.
I walked the harbor the second morning before the heat got murderous, and I counted the fleet.
Nineteen working boats. I'd seen harbors this size with sixty.
I clocked the ages of the men — fifties, sixties, one ancient pilot with hands like roots who I was told was seventy-eight and still went out at dawn.
I counted exactly four men under thirty-five, and three of those four were repairing, not fishing, which meant they worked the boats but didn't own a future in them.
I found the co-op office and read the notices in the window. Fuel costs. A grant application. A funeral, two weeks back — a fisherman, sixty-six, the whole town invited. I copied it all into the notebook in my small flat hand.
The arithmetic held. It always holds. I felt the grim satisfaction I always feel when a place confirms what I already knew, and I felt, underneath it, something I usually don't, which was the wish that for once it wouldn't.
I want to be clear about what that wish was, because it matters later.
It was not sentiment. I don't do sentiment; sentiment is what killed my father, dressed up as loyalty and served daily until his heart gave out.
It was something colder and worse. It was the suspicion — new, unwelcome, growing by the hour in that white heat — that I had built an entire career on a verdict I'd reached at twenty, standing at a graveside, and that I had never once since then walked into a town genuinely willing to be wrong.
I prided myself on writing the verdict first and daring the place to disprove it.
But you can't be disproved by a place you've decided in advance to convict.
That isn't rigor. That's a sentence with a trial attached for decency's sake.
Cala Sirena was the first place in fifteen years that had made me notice the difference.
I told myself the heat was getting to me.
By the third day, I'd stopped pretending he wasn't part of the assignment too.
Rafael was everywhere I went. Not crowding me — he was smarter than that.
He simply happened to be at the harbor when I walked it, leaning on a boat, talking to the seventy-eight-year-old pilot in the dialect, his hand on the old man's shoulder in a way that didn't read as performance even to my cold eye.
He happened to be at Tonino's when I came for my morning espresso.
He held doors and offered nothing and waited, and the waiting was the most aggressive thing about him, because it forced me to be the one who spoke first or be the one who looked rude.
I made myself speak first. I wasn't going to be managed by silence.
"You're following me," I said, on the fourth morning, finding him predictably at the zinc counter.
"I live here. You're the one who keeps turning up where I am." He didn't look up from his coffee. "It's a small town, Mila. You picked it. Don't blame me for it being the size it is."
"You're with me to steer me. We both know it. So steer. Stop pretending you just happen to love the same six square meters of harbor I happen to be standing in."
He set down the cup and looked at me, and his face did the thing I was already starting to hate, which was that it went honest. Or read as honest. I could no longer tell the difference, and that frightened me more than any threat the club could have made.
"All right," he said. "You want it straight?
Yes. They sent me to make you love this town.
That's the assignment. I'm supposed to walk you past the lemon groves and the sunsets and the old men and the weddings until you can't bring yourself to write the words that kill it.
" He picked the cup back up. "And I've decided not to do it that way. "
"Why."
"Because it won't work on you. You said it yourself — you came pre-cooled.
The lemon groves bounce right off you. If I run the standard play you'll spot every move, the way you spotted me in under a minute, and you'll write your report twice as cold just to prove you can't be bought with a sunset.
" He shrugged. "So I'm not going to charm you.
I'm going to do the one thing the assignment didn't ask for, which is tell you the truth.
You want the arithmetic? I'll give you the arithmetic.
All of it. The numbers you found and the ones you didn't. And then I'm going to make you sit in a room with the men those numbers are about, and you can decide for yourself whether the math is the whole story. "
I stared at him.
"That's a play too," I said. "The no-play play. The 'I'm the only honest one here' move. It's just a more sophisticated lever."
"Maybe." He didn't deny it. He never denied anything, which was infuriating, because denial is a handle and I had nothing to grip.
"Or maybe I read your file before you got here too, Mila.
Maybe I know you grew up in a town like this.
Maybe I figured the only thing that'd ever move a woman who watched her town die is the truth told without a single sunset in it.
" He drained the cup. "You want to find out which it is, you'll keep showing up at this counter.
You don't, you'll write your report and leave and never know. "
He put a coin down — the same small refusal I'd made at him on the first day, handed back, and I knew he'd done it on purpose — and he walked off into the rising heat, and I stood there at Tonino's zinc counter absolutely furious, because he'd done it again.
He'd found the door. He hadn't told me he'd read my file. Maybe I read your file. He'd let me wonder. He'd made my own history into a thing he might or might not be holding, and now I'd lie awake again tonight not knowing how much of me he had.
Tonino refilled my cup without being asked. He'd watched the whole exchange the way he watched everything, like a man at a long-running play who knew all the lines.
"He is not lying," Tonino said. The most words he'd given me yet.
"Everyone's lying. It's a matter of degree."
The old man wiped the zinc with a rag worn thin as paper.
"Forty years he comes in here. The boy. Always the smile, always the talk, always the — " he made a smoothing gesture, palm flat, a man calming water.
"Charm, you say. Yes. The charm." He set the rag down.
"But the boy who carried Tonino's wife up the hill when she could not walk anymore, in the rain, two kilometers, and never told anyone — that one does not smile when he does it.
You understand? The charm is the road. It is not the man. "
She's not a road, somebody had apparently told Rafael, because I'd seen him not-drive me like one for four days. And here was the same word coming back at me from the other direction.
"You're all very poetic for a town that's dying," I said.