“No. You’re a man who draws birds and carries what his mother left him and tends her garden alone and pretends he doesn’t care about roses.” She’s not smiling now. “You’re not what you think you are, Lorenzo.”
The mockingbird changes songs. Three bars stolen from a cardinal, then a sound I don’t recognize.
“Go inside,” I tell her. “It’s getting cold.”
“You should come inside too.”
“In a minute.”
She stands. Pauses beside me. Her hand brushes my arm where the raised skin is. Through the cotton. Not accidental.
The screen door closes behind her.
I stay in the garden. The roses. The mockingbird running through its borrowed repertoire.
Not yet.
15
ISABELLA
He’s doing it again. The quiet thing. The pretending-nothing-happened thing. Three days since he pushed his sleeve up and let me trace silver lines across his forearm. Three days sinceuntil youlanded between us like a grenade. Three days since I found pencil birds in the margins of a field guide. Watched a man who kills people for a living turn red over an osprey drawing.
And now he’s reading reports. In our office. Six inches from my elbow. Like the world didn’t rearrange itself.
I’m going to lose my mind.
“Tomás isn’t the mole.” I’m typing fast. Too fast. Missing keys. “Your surveillance photos. The hotel. He’s meeting a woman, Lorenzo. A civilian.” He leans over. His arm crosses my sight line. “I pulled his phone records. The calls to the hotel room match a personal number. Not Benedetti. Not connected to anything.” I close the tab. “He’s a widower. Two kids. Meeting someone he doesn’t want his family to know about yet.”
“That’s not cleared.”
“It’s cleared enough. The financial records are clean. The hotel visits line up with a relationship, not a dead drop.” I pull up the next window. The list is shorter now. The names left onit are harder. “Which means our mole is still out there and we’re running out of places to look.”
He doesn’t respond to that. But his jaw shifts.
“I’m focusing on Marchetti.” I open the tabs I’ve been running all week. “The bookie you identified. His gambling operation feeds into the Benedetti network, but here’s the problem. Marchetti runs old-school. Cash settlements. In-person intermediaries. The digital footprint is thin.”
“How thin?”
“Thin enough that I can see the money going in but I can’t see what comes out. His books aren’t online. They’re physical. Ledgers. Paper.” My fingers curl against my palm. I straighten them. “I can crack any server on three continents but I can’t hack a notebook in a man’s desk drawer.”
He turns a page. With purpose.
“That’s very convincing,” I say. “You should do community theater.”
A sound comes out of him. Not a laugh. Adjacent to a laugh. Near enough to count. I flag it. Data point four.
We work. My keystrokes filling the room. Marchetti’s digital ghost frustrating me in a way the Benedetti encryption never did. At least firewalls fight back. Paper just sits there.
I stretch. My neck is a knot. The screen has been blurring for the last hour and my shoulders have migrated up to my ears. I twist in the chair, reach past him for the coffee Rosa left, and my elbow clips his forearm.
He doesn’t pull away.
A week ago he would have pulled away.
His hand lands on my shoulder. Not a grip. Just pressure. Thumb finding the knot at the base of my neck like he already mapped the tension and came back with coordinates.
I freeze.
