“I…I don’t know what I will do. With the rest of my life. I just don’t know.” I said.
“But I do. I have some ideas. See if you’d like any of them.” She said with a smile, and looked at me with an expression of such intense love that I suddenly felt I was home.
We walked back along the shoreline together, Luna trotting ahead with a focused, purposeful energy. Audrey’s arm was still loosely through mine. The turquoise water ran over our feet.
My shoulders, for the first time in three days, came down from somewhere near my ears.
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 givenme — 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, quietlyundemanding 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.”
