Chapter 34
thirty-four
BILLIE
I can’t believe I almost lost him.
The thought doesn’t arrive dramatically.
There’s no slow-motion, cinematic replay, which is strange, considering I’ve spent the last few days living inside an action movie.
Instead, the thought forms quietly, with the weight of something real.
I entertain it in the pause between one breath and the next, while I sit on a Roman rooftop with Rodrigo’s blood on the hem of my dress, watching two EMTs argue about gauze.
The rooftop has been a blur. I know, because I’ve been inside the blur for what feels like an hour, but who can be sure?
Time has lost its commitment to linear behavior.
Things happened: Marco was pulled to his feet, his wrists cuffed behind his back, his face bearing the imprint of Alana’s stiletto in a way that will be, I suspect, difficult to explain in his booking photograph.
He was escorted toward the fire door by four agents who treated him with a professional detachment he doesn’t deserve.
The rings were sealed in evidence bags by a woman with latex gloves and a face that communicated she had handled worse, all while Alana cried nearby, shouting something about how she “deserved them” for “catching Marco single-handedly!” The helicopter repositioned, its searchlight sweeping elsewhere, and the rooftop went from a theater of chaos to something quieter: an aftermath.
The part of the emergency where the emergency has ended and what remains is the accounting.
Rodrigo is propped against a ventilation unit, his jacket off, his left sleeve cut away by the EMTs to reveal the wound— a through-and-through, they said, which apparently means the bullet entered and exited his arm without lodging itself inside, which is, in the grim calculus of gunshot wounds, the preferable outcome.
He is going to be okay. They said this— both of them, independently, probably because I kept asking them in rotating turns.
He is going to be okay. They’ve promised me this.
The bleeding is controlled. The arm is bandaged.
He will need a hospital, stitches, probably a sling, definitely rest.
He does not look like a man who is interested in rest.
He is sitting there— bandaged, shirtless under the emergency blanket someone draped over his shoulders, his hair slightly wild, a smear of his own blood still visible on his jaw— and he is smiling. At me. With infuriating, gravity-defying calm.
“You need to stop looking at me like that,” I say, sitting beside him. My voice comes out shakier than I intend.
“Like what?” he asks.
“Like you didn’t just get shot.”
“It’s a small hole,” he says. “I have had worse from furniture assembly.”
“You have not.”
“IKEA is very dangerous, Billie.”
Benny is orbiting us— a large, food-laden satellite.
He has been hovering since the EMTs arrived, his concern for his cousin manifesting as a nonstop monologue about action movie characters who have survived worse injuries.
“In Lethal Weapon Two,” he is saying, pressing a napkin-wrapped something into Rodrigo’s good hand, “Mel Gibson is shot many times. Many, many times. And he is fine. He walks it off. You are tougher than Mel Gibson, primo. You are— eat this, it’s prosciutto— you are the Spanish Mel Gibson. ”
“I don’t want prosciutto,” Rodrigo says.
“You need the protein,” Benny insists. “For the blood. The blood needs protein. I read this somewhere.”
“You have never read anything.”
“I read it on a menu,” Benny clarifies, wounded. He turns to me, seeking an ally. “Billie. Tell him. The blood needs protein.”
“The blood probably needs protein,” I say, partly because I don’t have the energy to argue with Benny, but also because I’m still worried about Rodrigo— and if something like prosciutto has even a small chance at helping him, I’m all for it.
Benny nods, vindicated. He produces, from his other pocket, an entire wheel of brie wrapped in a cocktail napkin. “I also brought cheese,” he says.
“What healing properties does cheese have?” Rodrigo asks.
“For morale, obviously primo,” Benny says.
Across the rooftop, Melissa is standing with Agent Rakowski, and she is— even from this distance— clearly in command of the conversation.
Even at eight months pregnant, Melissa has the energy to oversee an entire crime scene.
Her hands are moving. She is making a point.
Steve stands beside her, one hand on the small of her back, nodding at whatever she’s saying with a supportive expression.
Melissa looks over at me. Our eyes meet across the rooftop.
She gives me a look— one look, brief, loaded with years of friendship— and I know what it says.
It says: Are you okay? It says: I’m proud of you.
It says: We will talk about all of this later, in detail, probably while I eat an entire pizza.
I nod back. She nods once. That’s enough. That’s all we need.
I look at Rodrigo again. At the bandage on his arm and the blood and the blanket and the way his eyes are soft even when the rest of him is hurt, and something inside me— something that has been building since Barcelona, since the boutique, since the baby shower, since long before any of this began— settles.
Not clicks into place. That implies it was a puzzle, that I was assembling something.
It’s not that. It’s more like… something sits down.
Something that’s been standing for thirty-five years, shifting its weight, waiting to be told it was allowed to rest. It sits down, finally, and I think about what I’ve learned.
Here is what I know:
I have spent my entire life trying to become the kind of woman who deserves the things she wants.
The promotion. The recognition. The proof that I am not just the assistant.
But I am changed now. I went into a compound and negotiated with arms dealers, and I walked into a casino in a red dress and talked my way past a bouncer, and I tased a man with a shoe, and I held a billion-dollar ring in my hand and threw it to save the life of someone I love, and all of it— every single insane, terrifying, exhilarating moment of it— was me trying to prove to myself that I was enough.
But I was always enough. I was enough before the blazer. I was enough before Spain.
And now, I have a man in my life who really sees me.
I don’t need to negotiate with arms dealers to be extraordinary.
I don’t need to infiltrate casinos. I just need to do the thing that makes me happy, whatever that turns out to be.
And right now— in this moment, on this rooftop— what makes me happy sounds remarkably like a stone house in the Italian countryside, and an easel in the corner, and morning light through the kitchen window, and someone beside me who sees me exactly as I am and finds that sufficient.
I look back at Rodrigo— and I know that everything is going to be alright, now.
“Billie!”
Alana materializes beside me the way she always does— as if she has been there the entire time.
She pulls me away from the crowd to a barrier above the roof’s edge, where we can look at the city expanding beneath us.
Her hair is a disaster, by her standards, which means it looks like it belongs in a shampoo commercial by anyone else’s.
She’s holding a glass of bubbling liquid.
“Where did you get champagne?” I ask.
“From the casino,” she shrugs, and I wonder at the fact she was able to escape the crime scene to run down stairs for a quick drink.
She takes a sip, then sits down beside me. For a moment, neither of us speaks. We just sit there, two women on a rooftop in Rome, looking out at a city that has seen everything and therefore cannot be shocked by us.
“Can I tell you something?” she says.
I wait.
“I knew,” she says, and her voice has that rare quality— the one that surfaces only in the moments when Alana is being completely real.
“About you and Rodrigo. I knew from the beginning. From, like, the baby shower. The way he looked at you— I’d never seen him look at anyone like that.
Not even me.” She pauses. “And the thing is? I wasn’t even jealous.
I was kind of, like— relieved? Because I’d always known he wasn’t mine.
Not really. He was always supposed to belong to someone else.
And that was obviously you. So I kind of encouraged you two. ”
I stare at her. “You— you encouraged us to be together?”
“Of course I did.” She looks at me like I’ve said something remarkably obvious.
“Why do you think I kept leaving you two alone? The dining car on the train? The chalet? I’m not, like, accidentally bad at chaperoning.
I am very strategically bad at chaperoning.
” She smiles. “He’s a good guy, Billie. An actually good guy.
And you’re a good person who deserves a good guy. The math was simple.”
“You kidnapped me,” I say, because I feel this deserves periodic acknowledgment.
“I did,” she agrees. “And it was the best thing that ever happened to you. Fixed all your problems at one time. You’re welcome.”
I laugh. It comes out wet and full and helpless. I know this is completely messed up, but I’ll have to sort it out in real therapy at some point.
“I actually really like you, Billie,” Alana says, and she says it simply. “You’re, like, the first real friend I’ve ever had. Drago doesn’t count. Drago was more of a business associate who happened to enjoy brunch and murder.”
“I like you too,” I say. “You’re insane, but I like you.”
“Okay, but— and I say this with love— you need therapy.” She holds up a manicured finger.
“Like, actual therapy. A professional. Someone with a degree. Because you are way, way too much of a pushover, and the fact that it took being kidnapped and dragged across Europe for you to finally start standing up for yourself is, like, clinically significant.”