My testimony put him away for life.
And Mateo Gomez ceased to exist.
The FBI gave me a new name, a new history, a new social security number, and enough seed capital to start over somewhere Quintero’s people wouldn’t think to look. They christened me Jason Riley, when I rebuilt enough of a paper trailto make the name feel owned — and a set of instructions, and a handler named Agent Briggs who called every three months to confirm I was still alive.
The instructions were simple: tell no one. Not friends, not colleagues, not anyone you sleep with. Not anyone you love.
Especiallynot anyone you love.
For the first four years I followed those instructions with the rigid compliance of a man who understood exactly what was at stake. I built a life — slowly, carefully, real estate investment that started small and grew through compounding effort. I put in everything I had into my business, until I realized one day that I had multiple millions in the bank, but my heart was completely empty. I was, in every social sense, a pleasant surface with nothing behind it.
The loneliness was something I accepted as the price of staying alive. I told myself it was manageable. That it was better than the alternative.
Then the loneliness stopped being manageable.
I can pinpoint the exact week. A Tuesday in October, four years ago, when I had been alone long enough that the silence in my apartment had developed into a haunting I couldn’t sleep through. I decided to get a dog. Not for companionship, exactly — I told myself it was for security, for routine, for something practical.
And then I walked through the door.
I’ve thought about what would have happened if I’d gone on a Wednesday. If I’d gone to a different shelter. If I hadn’t looked up from the puppies at exactly the right moment and seen her — Camila, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a goldenretriever puppy asleep across her lap, reading something on her phone with absolute unselfconscious absorption. Unaware of me, unaware of how she looked.
She had the most genuinely innocent face I had ever seen on an adult human being.
I adopted the golden retriever. I asked her for coffee. I did both of these things knowing exactly what I was doing and doing them anyway, because Mateo Gomez had been dead for three years and Jason Riley was so tired of living like a ghost that he was willing to break the only rule that had ever truly mattered.
We named the puppy Brownie. We got married six months after I proposed. And for three years, I lived the life I had never expected to be allowed — completely and gratefully.
I thought the cover was solid enough. I thought the years and the distance and the careful construction of Jason Riley were sufficient. Agent Briggs had assured me repeatedly that Quintero’s people had gone quiet, that the organization had fractured without him, that the threat level was low and diminishing.
I believed him.
I believed him right up until six months ago, when my phone rang with an unknown number, and a woman’s voice said my real name for the first time in seven years.
Mateo.
And everything I had built began, quietly and irreversibly, to collapse.
CHAPTER 12
CAMILA
Three days.
I had been in the Bahamas for three days and I still hadn’t decided anything.
That was the part that surprised me most — not the grief, which I had expected, but the paralysis. I had always thought of myself as someone who, when pushed hard enough, would simply act. Make a decision, move forward, put one foot in front of the other. It was the thing I prided myself on, quietly, in the way introverted people took private stock of their own competencies.
But I had been sitting in a hotel room for three days and I could not decide a single thing.
Go home? Home was the house we had built together, the one with Brownie’s dog bed in the corner of the kitchen and Jason’s coffee mug on the second shelf and three years of accumulated life distributed through every room. I couldn’t picture walking through that door. I couldn’t picture what came after it.
Don’t go home? Then what? Stay here indefinitely, in a hotel room that smelled like sunscreen and someone else’s vacation, eating room service and watching the ceiling?
I had called Elena once, on the second night, and hung up before she answered. I wasn’t ready to say it out loud to someone who knew us both. Saying it out loud would make it a story, and right now it was still something I was living inside of, something I hadn’t found the edges of yet.
On the morning of the third day I gave up on the hotel room and went to the beach.
The beach at least was honest about what it was. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than sand and water and sky, which was more than I could say for most things at the moment. I walked along the shoreline with my sandals in my hand and the warm water running over my feet, and I tried to do what people in movies did on beaches — find clarity, reach conclusions, feel something resolve.
