Chapter 35
thirty-five
RODRIGO
Six months later.
In the stone studio behind our chalet in Tuscany, Billie Harper is painting a lemon, and it looks like a crime scene.
She has been working on this lemon for forty minutes.
The lemon— which is sitting on a plate on the windowsill, where the morning light turns it a shade of gold that any painter would be grateful for— has done nothing to deserve what Billie is doing to it on canvas.
Her rendition of the fruit is an asymmetrical blob.
But she is concentrating with the full intensity of her enormous brown eyes, and a smear of cadmium yellow decorates her left cheekbone like war paint, and she is so beautiful that I would let her murder every lemon in Italy and hang the evidence on our walls.
Six months. We have been here six months.
I know this because I have counted them, with quiet gratitude.
Every morning I wake up and Billie is beside me— her hair fanned across the pillow, her breathing slow, her body curled toward mine as if even in sleep she is deciding to be near me— and every morning I think: She is still here.
Still real. Still not a dream I invented because I wanted it too badly.
My left arm aches when the weather changes.
The scar sits just below my shoulder— a puckered, pale line where the bullet entered and a matching one on the other side where it left.
Some mornings I catch Billie looking at it.
She touches it sometimes, running her thumb along the raised skin, and doesn’t say anything, and I don’t say anything, because we are both still quietly working out what happened.
“Rodrigo,” Billie says, without looking up from her lemon-crime. “Be honest. Does it look like a lemon?”
I lean over to examine her canvas. I tilt my head.
I tilt it the other way. I consider the painting from multiple angles, giving it the thoughtful evaluation it deserves.
“It looks,” I say carefully, “like something that was once a lemon, and has gone through a significant, transformative experience.”
“So no.”
“It looks like a lemon’s feelings?” I offer. “Maybe it’s interpretative.”
“I want it to look like a lemon’s body.” She frowns at the canvas with furious concentration, and I am reminded— as I am reminded constantly, daily, in ways large and small— why I love her.
I know her now. Not in the way I knew Alana— the way you know a firework, brightly and briefly— but in the way you know a piece of music you’ve heard a hundred times and still discover new things in.
I know that Billie cannot cook anything except pasta with butter, and that she does not consider this a limitation but a lifestyle.
I know that she reads before bed, always fiction, always with her knees pulled up and the book held close to her face as though she is trying to climb inside it.
I know that she hums when she brushes her teeth— a different song each morning, unconsciously selected, and I have begun cataloguing them because the selection reveals her mood.
I know that she still apologizes too much, and that she is working on this, and that the working-on-it is itself a form of apology that is wildly unnecessary.
I know that she is kind without an agenda.
That her kindness is not a strategy but a fact— like her height, or her freckles, or the gold flecks in her eyes that catch the Tuscan light and make me lose sentences mid-thought.
I know that she believes in people with a stubbornness that borders on irrational, and that this belief— this insistence on seeing the good in others— is both her greatest vulnerability and her greatest strength, and that the line between the two is so thin as to be nonexistent.
I know, in short, that I was right. The thing I felt at the baby shower, the instant recognition that this woman was different— it was not the pattern repeating.
It was not me projecting a fantasy onto a stranger because she had beautiful eyes and a face you could trust with your darkest secret.
It was instinct, and for once in my impulsive, mistake-prone, leap-before-looking life, my instinct was correct.
Billie is the woman I always wanted. And the wanting has not diminished with knowing. It has deepened.
“We need to review the proposal for the Aleppo site,” Billie says, still frowning at her lemon. “The local coordinator sent revisions. I think we can negotiate the materials cost down another twelve percent if we adjust the timeline.”
This is the other thing. The project. Our project— the refugee housing initiative that started as a conversation at this very table three months ago and has since become, through Billie’s relentless negotiation skills and my knowledge of construction, something real.
Something with blueprints and budgets and partner organizations.
Something that uses every part of who we are— her ability to walk into a room and convince people to do things they didn’t plan to do, my ability to build things that stand up and keep people safe.
We are going to do good in the world.
This is something we have both decided after seeing the bad.
She negotiates with contractors the way she negotiated with Marco’s men in the compound. The contractors find her charming. They also find her terrifying. This is the correct response.
I set down my brush and pick up my phone. The nonprofit account— the one we opened in Rome, the morning after the rooftop, when Billie was in my shirt and I my arm was bandaged and we were deciding what to do next— loads on the screen. I scroll to the balance.
Two hundred and fourteen thousand euros.
I stare at the number. Six months ago, this number was zero.
Now we have two hundred and fourteen thousand euros committed to building homes for people who have lost theirs, and the woman responsible for raising most of it is sitting four feet away from me, painting a lemon that looks like it has been through a war.
“Two-fourteen,” I say, holding up the phone.
Billie looks up. Her face breaks into that smile. “We’ll hit the Phase One target by October,” she says.
She is not the assistant anymore. She is the builder. The woman who walks into rooms and makes things happen, not for someone else’s empire, but for something that matters.
She reaches for her own phone— hers, a new one, one that has never been thrown from a train— and swipes through it. “Oh! I forgot to show you. Melissa sent the new photos.”
She brings the phone to me, and there, on the screen, is a baby. Melissa’s baby. A baby girl— round-faced, dark-eyed. In the photo, Melissa is holding her.
The baby was born in Chicago. Four days after they flew home.
Melissa called from the delivery room, which we know because she called Billie first and the doctor second, and she said— and I quote, because Billie quotes it regularly— “Billie, my vagina has been through something, and I want you to know this baby is named after you.” The baby’s middle name is Billie.
The first name is something else, something I always forget, because Melissa only ever refers to her as “my baby” or “the tiny dictator” or, on difficult nights, “the reason I will never sleep again.”
“She looks like Melissa,” I say, studying the photo. “The expression. Very serious. Very much in charge.”
Then Billie’s phone buzzes. A notification. She looks at the screen, and her face does a thing— a quick succession of emotions.
“What?”
“It’s— Alana,” she says.
I feel a shiver travel the length of my spine. Not from the cold. From memory. We haven’t heard from her since that night, on the rooftop. I have been very happy with this.
“I would be happy,” I say, “to never hear from her again.”
Billie stares at me as if asking what to do. I sigh, leaning in and looking at the message. It’s a video.
“Play it,” I nod.
Billie presses play.
The screen fills with Alana’s face. She is— of course— wearing something pink and expensive, standing in front of an ocean view.
“Hiii,” she says, and her voice fills our studio. “Okay so like I know I’ve been MIA, but you won’t believe what I’ve been up to.” She swipes a hand in front of the camera and takes us back to a video that appears to have been recorded earlier.
The video shows Alana, standing in front of an enormous steel vault door, the kind that belongs in a Bond film or a Central Bank.
She turns the camera and places two familiar rings in indentations on a panel.
The vault door swings open— I hear the mechanism, heavy, precise, the sound of something that does not open often— and beyond it is a room that makes me hold my breath.
Gold. Stacks of currency in multiple denominations.
Paintings I recognize from auction catalogues.
Cases of jewels. The accumulated wealth of the Twin Ledger, the machine that Marco and Mateo built with blood and corruption and the particular human talent for making terrible things profitable.
The video clicks back to the ocean view, which I assume is Alana’s most recent location. “So I found the vault,” Alana says, smiling. “It was, like, not that hard? Marco’s security is honestly embarrassing without him.”
She starts walking, and suddenly I realized she’s on a yacht. White, gleaming, three decks. The Mediterranean stretches behind her in an endless expanse of blue, and she stretches out, lying on a lounge chair in a bikini as if this is an infomercial.
“Also,” she says, adjusting her sunglasses, “I am currently on a yacht in the Mediterranean with Reginald Ashcroft. He’s inside because he’s, like, super camera shy, which I know sounds fake, but it’s true.
He’s literally right in there. Reggie! Say hi!
” She turns the camera toward a cabin door.
The door remains closed. No sound emerges.
She turns the camera back to herself. “Ugh, he’s method-acting or whatever. Actors are so weird.”