“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, yeah.”
I poured two cups. She took hers with both hands. Our fingers didn’t touch.
We sat there in the dark, drinking Carlos’s coffee, listening to the waves, and for the first time since the gala—since the kiss, since the mistake that wasn’t one—the silence between us felt like something other than distance.
12
CHARLIE
It had become a thing, the veranda.
I don’t know when exactly it started—maybe the fourth night, when I wandered out with my laptop and found Asher already there, barefoot, nursing a beer in the dark. He’d looked up like he’d been caught, and I’d almost turned around. But he’d moved his feet off the other chair, and I’d sat down, and neither of us had said anything for maybe twenty minutes. Just the waves and the tree frogs and whatever was happening between us that we were both pretending wasn’t.
Now it was the fifth night, and we didn’t pretend anymore. Not about the veranda, anyway.
The air was heavy and warm, the kind that settled on your skin like a second layer. Somewhere below the terrace, the Caribbean lapped at the rocks in a rhythm that had been doing its thing long before either of us existed and would keep going long after we were gone. I found that comforting. The smallness of it.
Asher was in the chair beside me, legs stretched out, ankles crossed on the railing. No shoes. No watch. The Asher Pierce who appeared inForbesandBloombergwould have beenunrecognizable in this version—a man in linen shorts and a faded T-shirt who’d spent the afternoon in the water with Anselmo’s crew, checking the anchor points for tomorrow’s test dive.
I’d been telling him about Mia. I’m not sure how it started—maybe he’d asked about the texts I kept laughing at, the string of voice memos she’d been sending all week. Mia narrating her life in ninety-second bursts: a disastrous date, a client who wanted her to plan an event theme around “minimalist maximalism,” a new chocolate shop she’d found in the East Village that she was pretty sure was a front for something but the truffles were transcendent so she didn’t care.
“She sounds like a lot,” Asher said, but he was smiling.
“She’s everything.” I pulled my knees up to my chest. “When my dad died—I was in my second year at MIT, and Mia just showed up at my apartment with a suitcase and she just ... stayed. Didn’t ask. Didn’t announce it. Just moved in for three weeks and made sure I ate and showered and didn’t disappear into my own head.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That’s rare. Someone who just shows up.”
“The rarest.”
The tree frogs filled the silence. I took a sip of the wine Carlos had poured with dinner—something local and slightly sweet that I’d never have ordered in a restaurant but that tasted exactly right here.
“You have someone like that?” I asked. “Someone who just shows up?”
He didn’t answer immediately. I’d noticed he did that—took questions seriously enough to think before he spoke, which was disorienting coming from a man who made billion-dollar decisions at the speed most people chose lunch.
“Mike,” he said. “And my brother Destry.”
I’d seen the name in articles. One of the twins, the marine biologist that he’d mentioned at the party. Less visible than Asher, more visible than Devlin, who seemed to exist mostly in tabloid photos from European clubs.
“Are you close?”
“We’re ...” He paused, turned his beer bottle slowly in his hands. “Destry’s the one who calls me on my bullshit. Which I need more than I like to admit. He flew to Singapore once because I’d been dark for two weeks during a deal that was going sideways. No call. No text. Just showed up at my hotel. Sat in the lobby until I came down.”
“How long did he sit there?”
“Six hours.” A pause. “He ordered room service to the lobby. The concierge didn’t know what to do with him. A Pierce brother eating pad thai on a settee in the Four Seasons for half a day.”
“Sounds like Mia.”
“Except Mia brings chocolate. Destry brings scotch and opinions.”
I laughed. A real one. He looked at me when I did, and something shifted in his face—a softening that I’d only started to notice in Roatan, as if the island was dissolving layers of him that I hadn’t even realized were there.
“What happened when you came down?”
“He said, ‘You look like shit. Let’s go eat something that isn’t pad thai.’” Asher shook his head, almost smiling. “He didn’t ask about the deal. Just sat across from me at dinner and talked about nothing for two hours until I could breathe again. That’s Destry. He doesn’t need you to explain. He just needs you to show up for the meal.”
The idea landed somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Someone who could cross an ocean on the strength of your silence alone.
