Page 66 of Cruel Lies

"Ain't that the truth," I mutter.

The shark drifts past again on his patient loop. I point my wine glass at it.

"That's you," I inform him. "That's your whole personality, right there. Circling. Unhurried. Waiting for something to bleed."

"Interesting." He leans back and considers the creature. "I'd have said that one'syou."

"Excuse me?"

"Sand tiger shark. Looks terrifying. Rows of visible teeth. Almost never attacks unprovoked." He turns the full weight of his attention back to me. "But when provoked, she is entirely without mercy. I have a conference room full of witnesses who'd agree."

Is that a compliment? I mean, it walks like a compliment and it quacks like a compliment. But should I really be flattered by being compared to a shark?

Jury's still out.

"Fine," I say, reaching for composure and mostly finding wine instead. "Then what are you, in this metaphor? And do not say the octopus. The octopus is charming and I'm not sure what you are yet."

He thinks about it for so long that I'm wondering if I said something wrong. Then:

"The kelp," Ronan says finally.

"Thekelp?!”

"It looks decorative." He tips his glass toward the swaying green wall behind him, two stories of it, dense and dark at the roots. "But most people never look closely enough to see what it's hiding."

When we finish, the waiters clear our plates, but we don't get up quite yet. It's nice to linger in place, in comfortable silence, and sip my wine as the kelp sways and the shark circles.

Eventually, Ronan stands and holds out a hand. "There's one more tank I want to show you," he says.

I take the hand and let him pull me to my feet.

He leads me past the octopus—who has migrated to the far corner, perhaps contemplating another break for the drain—and into a private elevator.

I bite back the urge to ask where we're going now. I'm glad I did, too, because the wow factor of the view that awaits us at the top is worth every bit of suspense.

I don't fully understand the architecture of it, whether it's part of the building or on top of it or somewhere I've lost the thread of geographically, but the walls are glass and the ceiling is glass and the floor along one whole side isalsoglass, because the floor on that side is water.

It's a pool.

A glass-bottomed, glass-walled pool that hangs out past the edge of the building and over the drop, so that the water and the lights and the Ferris wheel and the whole enormous black shine of the ocean all seem to pour into each other with nothing to hold them apart.

"This is the last tank," Ronan says behind me. "I'll get us something to drink."

He moves off toward a bar built into the far wall. I hear ice clinking as I gaze at the pool.

I look at the water.

Somewhere in the back of my skull there's a voice, and I know exactly whose it is, because I spent ten years married to it.

Isabella left some stretch marks on her way out, huh?

You're curvy, Cal.

Maybe you shouldn't wear that one.

A decade of a man teaching me to subtract myself, to fold down, to make myself smaller and quieter and, ultimately, easier to leave.

The voice is there. It's just not loud enough anymore.