“Oh, bullshit.” She lifts the neck of the T-shirt and wipes beneath her eyes, inspecting the gray smudges left on the fabric. “Cut to the chase. I’m tired. Not all of us look like a wealthy father of the bride at nothing o’clock in the morning.”
My hand dives into the pocket where the velvet box is stowed, but I hesitate, struck with a case of nerves.
How does she do this to me? All week long I speak to powerful people without a ripple of anxiety: FIA officials, sponsor CEOs, heads of state in host countries. Yet this woman—barefoot and sleepy, dressed in an absurd novelty shirt—affects me as if she were a planetary empress holding my fate in her palm.
I withdraw the box. “I’d like for you to keep this. I… can’t have it anymore.”
She frowns, moving to sandwich herself between the entryway wall and the door, arms crossed tightly. “If that’s the necklace,Ican’t have it either, and you know it.”
“Consider it a gift of… friendship.”
“We’re not friends anymore. And if I wanted to wear something worth tens of thousands, I’d hang a first-edition copy ofCatcher in the Ryearound my neck.” She folds my fingers over the box and pushes my hand away.
“You needn’t keep it,” I insist. “You once spoke of helping the library in your hometown. This could go far in that goal. I won’t be hurt if you sell it.” I meet her eyes. “Please, kleine Hexe.”
Her trembling hand moves to the hollow of her throat as if the necklace hangs there still, and her eyes brighten with tears. “Don’t call me that,” she almost whispers.
“Es tut mir leid,” I automatically apologize. In truth, it was a relief to say the former pet name aloud, inadvertent as it may have been.
With one hand, she picks at her opposite sleeve hem. The little nails of her toes are painted a shimmering bronze color, and she flexes them on the herringbone-tiled floor.
“No.” She shakes her head. “It’s too valuable. You can give it to someone else.”
“Do you think I could give another woman the same gift?”
Hostility flashes in her eyes. “You once offered mecash, Klaus, and in almost the same breath made it clear that was your standard operating procedure. We all got your little stack of euros. Why not necklaces too?”
“Itwasmy ‘standard operating procedure.’” I touch her chin and tip her head to meet my gaze. “You once made me hope for more.”
I graze a knuckle along her jaw, then trail it down her neck. By the time I’ve reached the shoulder, her eyes have closed. She sways a little. I cup her hand, placing the box on her palm.
“I won’t trouble you further,” I tell her soberly. “This finishes it.”
Her lips part as if to say something, but then she presses them together.
“Thank you,” she manages after a pause, rubbing the box’s velvet with her thumb. “For your generosity. And for understanding why it can’t mean more. Not at this point.” She shrugs, but I can tell she doesn’t truly feel the casualness implied by the gesture. “We blew it. Not meant to be.”
I look down at our feet—hers bare and soft, mine armored in Berluti loafers. “It’s fine.”
It’s not fine. It will never be fine.
“Goodbye, Miss Evans.”
She steps back, swallowed by darkness, and closes the door.
When I get to my room, I sit on the edge of the bed for a long time, studying the sunrise out the window.
I should never have apologized back in Melbourne. Had she continued hating me after the night we met, it might have healed faster for us both. But I couldn’t let well enough alone, and the scars are much worse for having prolonged it…
Taking my phone from a breast pocket, I look up the town in which Natalia was raised, then send a donation of thirty thousand dollars—the value of the necklace—to the library there, in case Natalia decides to keep my gift.
10
LONDON
TWO WEEKS LATER
NATALIA
