"Why did you notice the gap?"
"Because I was building a file on Dante Conti." His jaw works slightly. "The family inventory. Assets, liabilities, leverage points. Dante has a sister from his father's first marriage — that's in every public record. What isn't in any record is whether she's in contact with the family, where she lives, what she does. A blank that should have information." He pauses. "I noticed it. I found the photograph through secondary sources — someone who'd been to the same language program in Siena three years before you, who had photographs from a group dinner." He looks at his hands. "It wasn't strategic. The file was strategic. The strategy was the only language I had for it."
"For what?" I ask.
He looks at me.
"For wanting something I couldn't calculate," he says.
The jet crosses into different airspace. Below us, invisible, the continent.
I close my laptop. I look at him across the table — the hard lines of his face in the cabin light, the careful construction of a man who learned very young that wanting things without a plan for obtaining them was the specific vulnerability his world couldn't afford.
He built a plan. The plan was wrong. The thing it produced turned out not to be the thing he thought he was acquiring, and he has been operating with that specific surprise since approximately thirty minutes after I walked into the Tower suite and asked when dinner was.
I understand this. I've understood it for a while, which is different from forgiving it, which is different from deciding what to do about it.
"You could have just— there were other ways," I say. "You didn't have to engineer it."
"I know."
"If you'd found another path?—"
"Sofia." Very quiet. "I know. I've been aware of that since October." He meets my gaze. "I'm not going to defend it. I'm going to spend a long time not defending it." His hands are very still on the table. "I can tell you that if I had it to do again, I would have found a different way. And I can tell you that I don't know if a different way would have brought me here, to this table, and I don't know what to do with that."
The cabin is quiet.
I sit with this.
"You're saying you'd do the wrong thing again," I say slowly, "because the wrong thing brought you here."
"I'm saying I don't know." He holds my eyes. "I'm saying the calculation is broken and I know it's broken and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."
A man who has spent twenty-five years being certain of his calculations, telling me he doesn't know.
I don't know what to do with that either.
But when we land and the strip blooms in the window — all that impossible light against the desert dark, the casinos burning gold and neon — I look at him and he's already looking at me. Not assessing. Not calculating. Just looking, in the way I've started to recognize as the version of him that doesn't have a name for what it is and has stopped trying to find one.
Okay,I think.
Las Vegas.
The plane taxis toward the gate.
I don't move away.
27
SOFIA
Las Vegas from above looks like a fever dream.
The circuit runs through the city's heart — past casinos lit like the sun went supernova and never came back, past the Strip bleeding neon into the desert dark, past two million people who came here specifically to be overwhelmed and are getting exactly what they paid for. From the Obsidian hospitality suite on the thirty-eighth floor, the whole tableau is spread out below us: the track, the crowd, the city swallowing itself in light.
He's down there somewhere.
Sixty laps. One hour and thirty-seven minutes. A hundred and eighty miles per hour through the chicane between casinos while the world watches and I stand in a glass room thirty-eight floors up and tell myself I'm fine.
