I understand the terms.
I'd read it twice before I replied. Sent her the address, the time, the instructions.
I've read her four words thirty or forty times since. I keep reading them anyway, searching for what I might have missed — some qualifier, some joke, some indication that this is a fraud or a trap or a person who didn't fully understand what they were replying to.
Nothing. Just those four words. Clean. Deliberate. Someone who read what I want — what I actually want, the thing I've never said aloud to a single human being — and typed four words back without apology or theater.
She's in Miami today. Tonight, at seven, she's going to walk into a room and I'm going to —
My stroke falters. I force it steady.
Control. Keep swimming.
The flutter in my chest surfaces on the next length and I observe it from a distance — this is nervousness. This is what wanting looks like in a body that hasn't let itself want anything in years. My pulse is eight, maybe ten beats above resting. The thought of tonight keeps surfacing no matter how hard I push. The meeting. The first time I'll have said the words to a real person in the same room, looked across a table and admitted to the specific thing I am.
My head won't go entirely quiet this morning, and I know why.
Every other version of this has been approximation. Women who sensed something and leaned in, not knowing what they were leaning toward. Encounters that brushed against the edge but never named it. Tonight I named it. She answered. And something in my chest that has been very quiet for a very long time is not being quiet about it.
By the time I reach the sand, water sluicing off me, my phone is buzzing. The city is fully orange now, and the sky is that pale citrine that means the sun is close. I breathe. Reach for the phone.
Nico. 5:10am. Three missed calls.
Nico doesn't call at 5:10am.
His next call, I answer.
"Jorge's dead." Nico's voice is flat. Not empty — Nico Rosetti doesn't do empty — but stripped to function. "The cancer finally got him. The night staff found him ten minutes ago. I can't do much from here, I'm in Chicago with Marisol."
I'm already off the sand.
"Who else knows?" I have the towel in one hand, the phone in the other. Water running off me onto the sidewalk. My mind has already assembled a list.
"Night staff. Me. Now you."
"Keep it that way for two hours. I need to get to the residence first."
"Logan —"
"I'll handle it."
I hang up. Not because I'm dismissing him. Because there's nothing else to say, and standing on a sidewalk getting cold isn't handling anything.
I'm dressed and in my car in four minutes.
Jorge's bedroom smells like illness. I've been in this room a dozen times in the last six months, but the furniture arrangement surprises me slightly — they'd moved the hospital bed to face the window, so he could see the garden. I didn't know that.
I stand in the doorway and look at him for three seconds.
Then I call the funeral home. Then the lawyer. Then the accountant. I photograph the office, note what's in the safe and what isn't, work through the document checklist I've been quietly maintaining since he got the diagnosis.
The safe holds what I expected: trust documents, property deeds, a sealed envelope for Marisol in his handwriting. And one thing I didn't expect — a photograph tucked beneath the deeds.Him and me at La Sirena's opening night, seventeen years ago, when I was thirteen and already learning to keep secrets. Jorge's hand on my shoulder, both of us squinting into somebody's flashbulb. He looks healthy in it. Young.
I put it back. I photograph the deed.
I do not touch Jorge. I don't say anything.
There's nothing to say to a body that can't hear it.
