“I have something to tell you,” he said, catching me off guard. He said it as though he were bringing up the weather.
I stopped and he stopped. He didn’t reach out to touch me again. Instead, he faced me. Hesitation was highly unusual for him.
He studied my face for some time before he said, “I’m an offshore diver now.”
I met this revelation with a bit of awe and a lot of fear. My father was an oilman, and though his hands never dirtied, he took measures to know every crevice of his industry. My father worked nonstop, and sometimes I’d catch snippets of his conversations.
Offshore diving wasn’t for the weak. It was dangerous and more than physically demanding on the body. The most a diver could last was three hours under the water, and depending on how deep the dive, they sometimes had to decompress for the same amount of time.
“Why?” I said, voice rising with panic. “Isn’t being out on a rig for two weeks risky enough? You’re nothing but a dot compared to all those monster machines! Now you’re going under with them?”
“Yeah. I’m good at it. I lay pipeline.”
The remark was meant as a joke, but the humor was lost on me. Shaking my head, I went to walk away, but he stopped me, grabbing me by the arm. His hold wasn’t hard, but it was enough to keep me in place.
I brought up dinner to change the subject.
“No,” he said. “This needs to be said.”
“Says the man who can talk to me without words,” I whispered. A sudden weight pressed in on my chest, making me breathless.
All that he needed to say was in his eyes. I felt it. He dived now, but there was something else, something he was about to say that I wasn’t sure I was prepared for.
“You went to Paris. You left home. I did too, Scarlett. I joined the Coast Guard.” He gave me a moment to process this and then continued forward. He shrugged. “Turns out, I was good at that too. One of the best.”
“Of course you were,” I said, the words slipping out.
“Good enough to be stationed in Alaska. A rescue diver.”
“In the effing Bering Sea.”
He gave one, slow nod. “Yeah. I retired after three years. Went back home. Now I do what I do.”
“Now I do what I do,” I repeated. “No one told me.”
“It was mine alone to offer you.”
“Offerme?”
“Yeah. I had something to prove.”
“You didn’t have a damn thing to prove to me, Fausti. Not a damn thing!”
Blood started to circulate, and my bearings were coming to me in a flood. I had to get a hold on my temper before it exploded. I felt cheated and slighted.
What else had he done?
He seemed to have a grip on every moment of my life—he knew the layout of the apartment I shared with Colette and Emilia, the key code to get in; he had a spare key, knew my schedule, the foods I enjoyed here, things that he would have had to be here to know.
He made no secret of it either. Big Brother Neil had watched over me while we were separated, reporting all of the boring details of my sad existence without himtohim.
Colette had pieced it together when he causally made a comment about a restaurant that I enjoyed, one that I had never brought up or taken him to. He grinned when I had accused him of being a stalker, the smug jerk.
“As long as you’re safe,” he had said. “The world’s safe. From me.”
Colette had also shed light on the mysterious identity of the Big Brother. He was the cab driver that had taken us to the underground club. Brando said that he was no longer in employment; little wonder. He most likely died of boredom after his detail on me.
As far as I was concerned, the only thing that threw Brando for a loop was Olivier Nemours. Brando Fausti was a man accustomed to waiting in the shadows, watching, but being kept in the dark on that front seemed to drive him mad.
