Page 12 of The Lion in the Library

He laughed softly. The musicians shifted into something I recognized, a bolero, slow and aching, the kind of music designed to close the space between people. Around us, couples drifted together. Even Susan from the conversation club was being spun gently by her husband, her face flushed with pleasure.

“I should probably keep an eye on the tambourine situation,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else.

“Probably,” Leo agreed. He didn’t move. Neither did I.

“Leo.” I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me.

“Estrella.” He said my name the way he always did, each syllable given its proper weight, the R soft and true. “Would you dance with me?”

My heart performed something completely unprofessional. “I don’t know if⁠—“

“One dance,” he said. “That’s all. And then I’ll go help Pedro shake that tambourine like a pro.”

I looked at my children. Luz had appointed herself Pedro’s dance instructor and was guiding his small hands in what appeared to be an extremely interpretive rumba. They were fine. They were more than fine, they were delighted.

“One dance,” I agreed.

He took my hand with the practiced ease of someone who had danced before, though I suspected his experience was more victory celebrations than ballrooms. His other hand settled at my waist, gentle and certain, and we found the rhythm of the bolero together with an ease that surprised me.

This close, I could smell his cologne, something warm and woody, and beneath it, something more honest. Just him. The library lights caught the planes of his face, the small scar above his right eyebrow I’d never had a chance to ask about, the way the corners of his eyes creased when he looked down at me.

“You’re good at this,” I said.

“My grandmother taught me. She said a man who can’t dance is a man with no music in his soul.” He smiled. “She was a very dramatic woman.”

“I like her already.”

“She would have liked you. She had very strong opinions about passion and about people who weren’t afraid to feel things.”

I thought about that. I had spent the last two years trying not to feel things, trying to fold myself into something smaller, more manageable, easier to transport across borders and into a new life. And here was this man, turning slowly beneath string lights on a library lawn, telling me that the thing I’d been trying to suppress was precisely what made me worth knowing.

“Leo,” I said quietly. “What are we doing?”

He looked down at me, his expression open and honest in that way I still wasn’t entirely used to. “Dancing,” he said. “And possibly falling in love. But I’m trying to be subtle about the second part.”

A breath left me that I hadn’t known I’d been holding.

“You are not particularly subtle,” I informed him.

“I know.” He didn’t look sorry about it. “Is that terrible?”

I thought about my first husband, who had been so subtle I’d had no idea about the starlet until she posted a photo. I thought about my second husband, who had been so smooth that I’d believed every word until the morning I walked through a door I wasn’t supposed to.

“No,” I said. “It’s... actually, it’s quite a relief.”

The bolero softened into its final bars, slow and intimate, and Leo drew me gently closer. Not presumptuous, not demanding, just an invitation I could decline. I didn’t decline.

“Mami,” Luz’s voice floated toward us from a few feet away. I turned to find her watching us with the expression of a small scientist completing a long-awaited experiment. “Are you in love?”

“Luz—” I blurted her name, but mostly because I didn’t want to say no.

“Pedro says you’re in love,” she reported. “Pedro, tell her what you said.”

Pedro considered this responsibility gravely. “I said they look like the cartoon prince and princess.”

“In the movie,” Luz clarified. “When they dance and the whole ballroom goes sparkly.”

Leo made a sound that was heroically not a laugh. I buried my face briefly against his shoulder, which was not at all helpful to my composure.