“Not what I was expecting,” I said. “I thought it would smell like fertilizer.”
He cocked his head. “It does, if you go to the cactus room.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Not yet. But you better toe the line, young lady.” He was still smiling. He offered me his hand, and I took it. He squeezed once, then let it go, but I kept it. Our fingers laced together like we’d done it a hundred times before.
We walked past the check-in desk—no one paid, no one checked, no one cared. The lobby was painted a sickly shade of teal, but past that the space opened up into a cathedral of green. The ceiling arched thirty feet overhead, glass shot through with iron, every surface beading with mist. A ramp circled up, winding through beds of ferns and palms, orchids in every color hung from black metal wires.
We walked slow. The floor was pocked with old water, moss clinging to the edges. The temperature went up a degree with every ten paces. I was sweating under my shirt by the first turn.
“This is incredible,” I said.
Pietro nodded, but he was watching me, not the plants. “My father used to bring me the botanical gardens in Palermo,” he said. “He loved nature.”
I squeezed his hand. “Did you like it?”
“Me? No! I hated it. All I wanted was to go to the movies. But now, I appreciate it more.”
We kept walking. I let the air fill my lungs, warm and wet, and for a minute, I thought about what it would be like to just lose myself in this, to be a person who went to gardens for fun, who had memories of childhood not soaked in secrets and math.
We stopped in the Palm House. The light was different in here—filtered through a thousand fronds, deep green, almost blue. The leaves dripped, shedding water onto the dirt. The trunks were thick and hairy, banded in scars. There was a banana tree in the center, its fruit bunched up high in a web of mesh.
I reached up, traced the edge of one leaf with my finger. It was waxy, cool to the touch.
Pietro watched me, his face softer than I’d ever seen it.
I said, “You ever think about being somewhere else? Like, just leaving everything behind?”
He shrugged. “All the time. But I don’t think I’d be happy there.”
“Why not?”
He gave me a look, like I was missing something obvious. “Because I’d still be myself.”
I laughed. The noise bounced off the glass, bright and surprising. “That’s dark.”
He said, “But true. I’d miss my family, too. Even though they drive me berserk.”
I liked this, the way he didn’t dress things up. No pep talk, no empty optimism. He said it like it was the weather—bad sometimes, but survivable.
We stood under the banana tree for a while, just breathing. I felt the heat under my collar, the sweat on my lower back, the weird tingle in my stomach that had nothing to do with temperature.
He was so honest. I wanted to share with him. Something that made me feel ashamed. Something I had never told anyone else.
I said, “I want to tell you something.”
He turned, both hands on the rail, but didn’t crowd me. “Tell me.”
“I worked at Halberd for four years,” I said. The words came out easier than I expected. “I suspected what they were doing for fourteen months before I went to the FBI.”
He said nothing. I could hear the drip of water, the distant shouts of kids from another room.
“I kept telling myself I needed more data,” I said. “Or that if I waited, maybe someone else would speak up. But nobody did. People lost their pensions because I was slow.”
He looked at me, just looked, and I could see him cataloguing it, storing it away.
He said, “That’s not your fault.”
