“That’s right. From now on, it’swe.”
27
BEA
The drive takes two hours.
I watch the city disappear in the side mirror. The skyscrapers shrink first—the financial district, then the bridges, then the long industrial sprawl that bleeds into the highway. Then there’s just road. The sun comes up while we drive—a pale rim along the horizon first, then the long color, then a clean morning.
Raffaele’s on the phone for most of it.
He doesn’t put it on speaker. He talks low, in clipped sentences, about names I don’t recognize and rotations and timelines and which crews can be trusted with what.
I don’t interrupt.
I lean my head against the cool of the window and let the road do its work. I haven’t been outside the city in five years. The last time I left was for a funeral, in a town I’d never been to, and the bus ride out felt like exile. This is so much different.
The exits come and go. The salt smell starts somewhere around exit ninety-eight. By a hundred and four the road’s narrowed to two lanes, there are scrub pines on either side, and I can hear the gulls before I can see the ocean.
We turn off.
A long gravel drive. Trees crowding it on both sides, then thinning, then opening.
I sit forward.
“Oh.”
The house is even more beautiful in person.
It’s modern. Three stories of glass and clean lines on a low rise, the ocean spread out behind it like the whole sky’s been laid down on the ground. There’s a porch that wraps around the side I can see. There’s a path through the grasses down to a private stretch of beach. No other house in either direction for what looks like a quarter mile.
This is ours.
I have to say it inside my head twice before I believe it.This is ours.
The car stops at the top of the drive.
I step out. The air’s cold and clean and full of salt. My shoes crunch on the gravel. I tip my head back and breathe in once, deep, and a tightness in my chest unwinds a notch for the first time in three weeks.
Maybe this could work.
Maybe we could?—
I turn around.
Three SUVs.
They’re pulling up behind us in a tight line, gravel popping under the tires. Doors open. Men in dark suits step out—six that I can see right away, more in the third vehicle, all of them with earpieces, all of them with that cut to the jacket that means they’re armed. One’s already walking toward the side of the house with what looks like a long black case. Another’s unfolding a tablet.
Raffaele’s out of the car ahead of me. Already on the phone. He’s crossed to the closest of the men, and he’s pointing at thecorner of the house where the path heads down to the beach, and the man’s nodding.
The beautiful view is ruined.
It happens fast. Within a minute, the perimeter is being secured—men walking the property line, men checking the angles of the house, men setting up a small antenna thing near the driveway. The house has been ours for forty-five seconds, and there are already eight strangers on the grass.
I cross to him.
He’s still on the phone. “I want eyes on the dune line for the next forty-eight hours, minimum. Two on the road. One at the back deck.”
