“Everything alright, Camila?”
“Perfectly fine.” I smiled at him. “The usual?”
He nodded, still watching Jason with a mild wariness and obvious curiosity.
As Mr.Kamau paid for his breakfast, Jason placed himself right behind his short posture, and pressed his hands together. He mouthed:five minutes. Please.
I looked at him for a long moment.
Audrey appeared from the café side, read the room in the way she always did, and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ve got the café. If you want to give this person,” she said, with the diplomatic precision, choosing her words carefully in front of Mr. Kamau, “a moment to speak.”
I set down my books.
I jerked my head toward the back door.
The bookshop garden was small — a courtyard really, with terracotta pots and a bougainvillea that had taken over the back wall. It was the part of Dog-Eared I loved most.
I stood in the middle of it with my arms crossed and let Jason talk.
The story that came out of his mouth was so convoluted and so fucking fake, I started to wonder which Hollywood movie he took it off from.
He was under witness protection? He was blackmailed by Scarlett and her body-guard, and forced into having wild sex with her? He had an entire cartel thirsty for his blood?Andmine? And he was here to protect me?
I listened to all of it without interrupting.
Then I looked at him.
“Do you have any idea,” I said, very quietly, “how shitty your story sounds?
Jason said nothing.
“I only knew you as a cheating asshole. That was bad enough. Now you’re standing in my garden telling me you’re a witness protection case who was sex-trafficked by a cartel woman and the whole thing was actually an act oflove.” I laughed — a short, hard laugh. “That is the most shitty Hollywood script I have ever heard in my life.”
“It’s not a script, Camila. I know it’s almost impossible to trust me after what you saw. But what you saw was not the entire truth. “
“What I saw, Jason, is an entire forty five minute video of you as a masked intruder, tying up your lover and pounding her. You didn’t look like a man who was being blackmailed. You looked like a man who loved fucking another woman while your wife was getting ready to go to her anniversary dinner. You looked like you were having a lot of fun, Jason, so don’t come whimpering here like a dog with your bullshit story.”
Something moved across his face at that. He clenched a muscle on his face, and looked absolutely pathetic and full of shame.
“I know what it looked like,” he said.
“Then don’t insult me by telling me it was something else.”
He looked at me with those eyes. The dark, steady eyes I had spent three years believing in completely, the ones that, at one time would make me melt with desire, the ones that spoke a thousand words, before he spoke any.
But now I realise, all those words were just lies coming out of the mouth of a cheating bastard of a husband.
I had been wrong about this man.
I was not going to be wrong again.
“Camila.” He said it simply. “I can’t make you believe anything you don’t want to believe. I understand that. But you are in danger — real danger, whether you believe the rest of it or not — and I am asking you to let me protect you. That’s all. Not forgiveness. Not a conversation. Not anything you’re not willing to give. Just let me stay with you for a few days.”
I laughed again. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Camila—”
“I don’t need someone like you to protect me, Jason. Just fuck off. Fuck off out of my garden, Jason. And then fuck off out of my street, and then out of my island.”
