Three steps. Metal. The clang of an aircraft stair under a boot.
I went up the three steps.
The wind shifted. The whine grew louder. Somewhere behind me, very far behind me, a city I had been safe in for nine hours was still going on, and nobody in it, not one single person, knew where I was.
The door closed behind me.
The dark held.
Chapter 17
Pietro
Thepearonherplate had started to brown.
That was the first thing I noticed. Not consciously.
I tried to remember when she had stood up. She had kissed the side of my jaw and saidbathroom, then more coffee.I had saidthat’s my girl.The exchange had been so small and so domestic that I had not registered it as a data point. I had registered it as weather. Sun on a window. Tonio singing badly in the kitchen.
The first prickle came up the back of my neck. Not alarm. Something quieter than alarm. The recognition a body gave a room that had changed shape while it was not looking.
“Angela?”
I said it the way I had said her name a hundred times in the last week—light, easy, the inflection of a man calling across his own home.
Nothing answered.
Tonio looked up from the stove. He had a wooden spoon in one hand and a striped dish towel over his shoulder. He gaveme the look he had been giving me all morning, the small affectionate look of a cousin who was glad to have me in his kitchen.
“In the bathroom,cugino,” he said.
“For this long?”
He frowned. The frown was the smallest possible adjustment of his face and I watched it happen.
I walked down the hallway. I made myself walk. The body wanted to run and the mind would not let it because running was the body language of a man who already knew, and I did not know yet. I did not know yet.
The powder room door was not closed. It was an inch off the jamb.
I pushed it.
The light was off. The room was empty. The hand towel on the ring was undisturbed. The water in the bowl was clear. She had not been in here.
I stood in the doorway for one second and the second felt very long.
“Tonio.”
I called it back down the hallway, the way I had called her name. The same register. He came around the corner with the towel still on his shoulder and the spoon still in his hand and his face did the thing his face did when he had read a tone he did not like.
“Where is she?”
He looked past me into the empty bathroom.
“Cazzo.”
I went back into the kitchen. I went to the workstation. The three monitors were still open the way she had left them. The cursor blinked on a half-finished line of a Maltese correspondent file. The notebook lay beside the keyboard, open to a page she had been writing on.Krol — still signing. Same hand.The penwas uncapped beside it. The pen was where she had set it down to pick up the phone.
The phone was not on the desk.
