“Nobody’s touching him yet,” I state. “First, let’s work out what we’re dealing with. Then, we make a decision with Adelaide because it’s her life we’re protecting, not ours.”
Luca groans as if protesting but then nods, as does Ace.
A swell rises under us and passes again, the boards tilting and settling.
“We tell her not who we are but who we were. That’s a different thing, and she needs to understand that before we tell her we were mercenaries. That we only took out the worst of the worst. Never innocents.”
“I prefercontracted specialists,” Luca explains with a grin on his face.
“Did you ever consider,” Ace starts, to nobody in particular, “that we’re basically the sexier version of Dexter.”
Luca rolls his eyes hard, and I let out a bark of a laugh.
“Think about it. We had a code—only ever hurt people who absolutely deserved it. We kept it separate from our day-to-day activities, where we had hobbies. I’m just saying that Dexter had a harder time of it than we did, and he’s considered a hero in certain circles.”
“We’re nobody’s hero,” I say.
“We could be,” Ace offers with a shrug. “The right marketing.”
“Highly doubtful,” I respond.
“Reframing might help,” Luca contributes.
“Nope. We’re not pitching this as Dexter when we tell her.”
Luca is laughing now, despite himself, and I let them wind down because this is what we do. We spiral into comedy when the subject is serious. We’ve always done it. It’s how we managed years of work that would have broken most people and still came out of it with most of our humanity intact.
“Okay,” Ace says, settling. “So how do we do this? Practically.”
“We sit down with her,” I explain. “Probably in the morning when she’s relaxed and fed. We give her the whole picture on how we got into it, why we stayed, why we left, what we’ve done since.”
“And if she walks?” Luca asks.
“She won’t,” I state. “know her. She’s steadier than we think she is, been through a lot.”
“Fuck,” Ace mutters. “I’m not going to sleep tonight.” He’s rubbing his jaw and staring at the water, frowning.
Nobody says anything for a moment, just a gull cutting across overhead.
“She should be good, I think,” Luca adds. “I told her that I’d done bad things and wasn’t proud of it or that man anymore.” He stares at me. “I preempted. In case.”
“So did I,” I say.
“Me too,” Ace offers.
“Then she’s been warned. We’re not dropping it cold but filling in a picture she already knows is there.”
A larger set starts rolling in from the outside. Ace eyes it, positions himself. “Last wave,” he says. “Then in.”
He takes the wave. Luca and I follow.
Adelaide is worth every difficult conversation we need to have, every uncomfortable truth.
She came to us on a surfboard out of a mess we didn’t cause, and she’s going to walk through worse with us because she chose us, and we’re going to earn it, every single day, for the rest of our lives.
Starting tomorrow, when we tell her the complete truth.
22
