Chapter 35 #2
Billie pauses the video. She looks at me. “Do you think that’s true? About Ashcroft?”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “Alana is a liar. Reginald Ashcroft is not on that yacht. No one is on that yacht except Alana and whatever stolen goods she has converted into a floating lifestyle.”
Billie looks at me with those enormous eyes.
“She said she knew him,” Billie says.
“She also kidnapped you.”
“Fair point.” Billie presses play again.
Alana’s face reappears, backlit by the Mediterranean sun.
“Anyway,” she says, “my vision board is, like, fully manifesting right now? Yacht. Check. Mediterranean. Check. Famous British actor. Check. Financial independence through morally flexible means. Big check.” She pauses.
Her expression shifts— fractionally, but I see it.
The bubbly veneer thinning to show something underneath.
Something real. “Oh— also. You guys should check the account for that dumb little nonprofit you’re doing.
The refugee thing. I think there might be something extra in there.
” She winks. “Love you, Billie. Tell Rodrigo I said he’s welcome. Again. As always. Forever.”
The video ends. The screen goes black. The studio is quiet except for the sound of birds outside and the particular silence that follows any communication from Alana, which is the silence of people recalibrating their understanding of reality.
Billie looks at me. “Check the account,” she says.
“I just did?—”
“Check it again.”
I pick up my phone. I open the banking app. I navigate to the nonprofit account— the one that showed two hundred and fourteen thousand euros ten minutes ago.
The balance loads:
Five million euros.
I stare at the screen. The number stares back at me.
“Five million,” I say. My voice sounds strange to my own ears— distant, as though it is coming from a man standing in a different room.
“Five million?” Billie repeats.
“Five million.” I turn the phone toward her. She looks at the screen. Her hand comes up to her mouth. Her eyes— those eyes, the ones that looked at me across a baby shower and a train and a casino and a rooftop and a hundred mornings in this kitchen— go wide and bright and wet.
“We can build everything,” she whispers. “The Aleppo site. The Beirut site. The whole Phase Two?—“
“We can build all of it,” I agree, and I am laughing, because what else can you do when your dreams come true? You laugh. You accept that the world is stranger and more generous than you understood, and you laugh.
Billie is laughing too— the bright, involuntary laugh, the one that shows her whole face and crinkles her nose and makes the freckles shift like stars rearranging themselves, and I set down the phone because the number will still be there— her face, her joy, the morning light in our studio— will not come again exactly like this.
“Rodrigo,” she says, still laughing, still looking at me with those eyes, “we can really make the world better.”
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Always,” she says.
“If you had a vision board— like Alana— what would you put on it?”
Billie is quiet for a moment. She looks at the studio— at the canvases against the wall, at the light through the windows, at the lemon on the windowsill that has survived its portrait with more dignity than the portrait afforded it.
She looks at my easel, at the olive grove taking shape on the canvas, at the brushes in the jar and the paint on the palette and the turpentine smell that has become the smell of home. She looks at me.
“Nothing,” she says.
The word lands softly. It has no weight because it carries no wanting. It is the lightest word she has ever spoken.
“Nothing,” she says again, and she smiles— not the big smile, not the one that uses her whole face, but the small one, the private one, the one I have learned is reserved for the moments when she is feeling something too large to perform.
“Everything I want has already manifested. You’re standing right here. ”
I look at her. She looks at me. The morning light does its work between us— catching the gold in her eyes, the yellow paint on her cheekbone, the small, unrepeatable details of the woman I chose and who chose me back.
I cross the space between us. It is not a large space— the studio is small— but I cross it with intention.
I kiss her.
Her mouth is warm and tastes faintly of the coffee we had this morning— the strong Italian kind, from the moka pot on the stove— and she makes a small sound against my lips, a sound that says she was expecting this and wanted it, and her hands come up to my face, her fingers tracing the line of my jaw the way they do every time, as though she is confirming that I am real.
I am real. I keep wanting to tell her this— I am real, I am here, I am not leaving— but she already knows.
She has known for months. The knowing is in the way she touches me: without hesitation, without the careful distance of someone who expects to be disappointed.
She touches me like she has decided to believe.
The kiss deepens. Her hands move from my jaw to my neck, pulling me closer, and something in me decides to do a very inappropriate thing.
I sweep my arm across the counter. The painting supplies go— brushes, palette, the shade of yellow that Billie has been using to assassinate her lemon— all of it clattering to the stone floor in a cascade of color and noise that would be dramatic if either of us were paying attention, which we are not.
We are paying attention only to each other.
I lift her onto the counter. She is small— her frame fitting against mine like an answer— and she wraps her legs around me and pulls me closer and I think: this.
This is what I was building toward. Not the country house.
Not the paintings. Not the nonprofit or the money or the adventure or the rooftop.
This. Billie’s hands on my neck. Her breath against my mouth.
Her body warm and real and present, in a room full of art and morning light.
I kiss down her neck. Slowly. With the specific, unhurried attention of someone who has learned— through a lifetime of rushing— that the best things are the ones you take your time with.
I feel her pulse under my lips, rapid and alive, and her fingers thread through my hair, and she says my name— “Rodrigo”— in a voice that makes the word sound like something sacred, which, coming from her, it is.
Her collarbone. The hollow of her throat.
The slope of her chest, where her skin is warm and faintly freckled, the freckles scattered like a private constellation visible only from this distance.
I map them with my mouth because I can, because she lets me, because in this life we have built together there is time for this— time to be slow, time to be thorough.
She is laughing again. Softly. Everything blends together; her fingers in my hair, her laughter in the air, the morning light on the stone walls of a studio in Tuscany.
I think: I have never been so happy. Rodrigo Esperanza, in this room, with this woman, at this moment: happiest he has ever been.
I kiss down her stomach. Her breath catches.
And I think about something I’ve carried for a long time— the idea that I am broken in some fundamental way. That the pattern— the rushing, the falling, the choosing wrong— was evidence of a flaw in my design.
But here is what I have learned, in six months: the difference between seeing someone as crazy or sane— the difference is just finding the person who fits.
The one whose chaos complements your calm.
Whose doubt meets your certainty. Whose enormous, golden-brown eyes look at you and see not the man you’re afraid of being, but the man you’ve always hoped you were.
Billie fits with me. She fits the way music fits silence. The way light fits a room.
Every day in the future is ours.
Billie pulls me back up to her. Her forehead presses against mine. Our breathing mingles in the small, sacred space between our faces.
“I love you,” she says.
“Te quiero,” I tell her. “Más que todo.” More than everything.
On the floor, the paint spreads in slow rivers of color— yellow and blue and red running together across the stone, mixing into something new. The lemon painting lies among the wreckage, face-up, and it is— I will admit this now— a terrible painting.
Billie Harper smiles at me. She has paint on her cheekbone and coffee on her breath and the morning sun in her hair, and she is— exactly as she is, without revision— the most extraordinary thing I have ever seen.
And I am exactly where I am supposed to be, no vision board required.
I’ll end this story the way I began, with one small alteration:
My name is Rodrigo, and my girlfriend— is perfect.