CHAPTER 13
JASON
Brownie was at my feet.
He’d been there most of the evening — his chin resting on my shoe, his amber eyes occasionally tracking upward to look at me with the patient, sorrowful understanding that dogs had and people mostly didn’t. He knew something was wrong. He’d known for a year. Dogs always did.
I reached down and scratched behind his ear without looking away from the dark window.
The home office looked the way everything looked now — functional, maintained, emptied of something essential.
The desk was clear. The files were organized.
The real estate reports I should have been reviewing for the past three weeks were stacked in the corner, unopened.
My business had been suffering in a quiet, incremental way since that day on the cruise when I held Camila’s wedding ring in my palm and realized my life was finished.
That was a year ago.
Camila had disappeared so completely that I had begun to wonder if the FBI had given her the same training they’d given me — how to become someone else, how to leave no trail, how to simply cease to be findable.
I had tried everything. Elena, who had stopped returning my calls after the third attempt.
Her book club friends, who received me with coldness, as if they knew.
Camila’s aunt — Aunt Rosa, seventy-three years old, four-foot-eleven, who had opened her front door, looked at me for exactly two seconds, and said: I don’t know where she is, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you, and closed the door on my face.
And exactly six months after the cruise, the divorce papers arrived.
No covering letter. No lawyer’s note. Just the papers, and a single sheet in Camila’s handwriting, in the careful, deliberate way she wrote when she wanted to be certain every word counted:
I’ve never asked you for anything. Today, I ask you to give me something. Sign these papers.
I sat at this desk and read it four times.
Then I’d called my lawyer to trace the sender. The papers had been filed through a firm in Miami — not Camila’s address, not any address connected to her. A dead end, which I suspected had been deliberate.
I had signed the papers the same evening.
Not because I had given up. Not because I believed it was over.
But because Camila had asked me for exactly one thing in the entire year since I had destroyed her trust completely, and honoring it felt like the only act of love still available to me.
She had said: I’ve never asked you for anything.
She was right. In three years of marriage she had been so consistently, quietly undemanding that I had sometimes had to work to find ways to give her things, because she would never ask.
She had asked for one thing.
So I signed.
I put the papers in an envelope, drove to the post office myself, and sat in the parking lot afterward for a long time with Brownie in the passenger seat and an eerie emptiness I was familiar with, but hadn’t felt in a long time.
Brownie whined softly now, at my feet, and I reached down again.
“I know,” I said.
The phone rang at nine-fourteen.
Unknown number. I almost let it go — I was done with unknown numbers. But what if it was Camila? I quickly answered the phone.
“Jason.” The voice was pleasant. Unhurried. Faintly accented.
The back of my neck went cold.
“Scarlett.”
“It’s been a while.I think we should meet. I’ll send you the details of my new fantasy.”
“I already told you where you could go. To hell, Scarlett.” I said. “ And that hasn’t changed.”
She laughed —light, and genuine, and completely untrustworthy.
“Oh, Jason. You’re still so righteous. You little puppy dog.
” A pause. “You think she’s safe, don’t you?
Far away from all of this. Living her little life, thinking the worst thing that ever happened to her was an asshole of a husband.
You think we couldn’t reach her, huh, Jason? You innocent little bastard.”
Something tightened in my chest. “Don’t.”
“She thinks she’s free.” Scarlett’s voice was almost sympathetic. “Starting over in her friend’s cute little bookshop. Finding paradise in Paradise Island. That’s sweet, isn’t it? She has absolutely no idea who she’s dealing with.”
“Scarlett—”
“You put my boss behind bars, Jason. Did you think that debt expired? Did you think we just — forgot?” Another laugh, shorter this time. “We found her. It wasn’t even difficult.”
I was already standing. “If you touch her—”
“You’ll what?” Her voice sharpened for just a moment, the pleasantness dropping. “You signed the papers. She’s not even your wife anymore. What exactly are you going to do, Jason?”
“I will personally make sure,” I said, very quietly, “that the grave of every single person connected to you is dug, and that person is rightfully laid to rest. And then I’ll start on the ones who aren’t connected to you yet. Touch Camila, and I will burn everything Quintero built to the ground.”
A silence.
“Oh Jason, you have no idea what we’ll do. We’ll put her in a very very dark place.Think about that.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the middle of my home office for approximately four seconds.
Then I opened my phone and typed: Paradise Island.
The Bahamas. The results loaded — tourism pages and resort listings, and the promise of a beautiful town at the shore.
Then I did another search: bookstore Paradise Island Bahamas.
Seven results. I opened each one, scanning owner names, scanning details.
Then I opened Camila’s Facebook and went to her friends list.
I compared names.
Six bookstores. Seven names. And there, on the fourth search result, a name that stopped me cold.
Dog-Eared Books & Café. Owner: Audrey Coleman.
I went to Camila’s friends list and searched: Audrey.
Audrey Coleman. High school friend. Last active eight months ago, a photo of a Great Pyrenees on a beach with the caption: paradise island mornings with Luna.
I looked at the photo for a moment — the turquoise water, the white sand, the small black and white dog squinting happily into the sun.
Then I closed the app, went upstairs, and started packing.
Brownie followed me to the bedroom door and sat there watching, his chin lifted, his tail making one slow sweep across the floor.
“I’m going to find her,” I told him.
He put his head down on his paws.
I packed faster.
I had to reach her before Scarlett and her cartel did.