Page 27 of The Lion in the Library

“I’m going over there,” I said.

“Leo—”

“I’m going over there, Hunter.”

A pause. “All right. Keep your head.”

I kept my head all the way through the drive across the city, which took forty minutes in afternoon traffic. I kept it in the elevator and through the corridor to her door and through the knock and the moment of waiting. I was completely composed when she opened the door, her expression already braced for another difficult conversation.

And then I saw, over her shoulder, the man standing in her living room in an expensive Italian suit, looking at the framed photographs on her bookshelf as if he owned them.

I had not met Jorge Mendez before. But I recognized him immediately — not from the photograph on Estrella’s bookshelf but from a type. I had encountered this type across twenty years of professional football, in changing rooms and boardrooms and restaurants all over Europe. Men who had learned early that charm was a tool and had spent their careers sharpening it to a very fine edge.

He turned from the photographs and extended his hand with the precise warmth of someone who had practiced the gesture.

“Ah — the Lion himself. What an honor.” He said it the way people say things they don’t mean while meaning exactly the opposite. “Jorge Mendez. I was just catching up with my wife.”

“Ex-wife,” Estrella said, with the automatic reflex of a woman who had corrected this before.

I shook his hand. I did not break any bones in it. I considered this an achievement.

“I was just expressing some concern,” Jorge continued, as if I had asked, “about Pedro spending time with — well. Strangers.”

He let the word land and watched to see where it would go.

I understood exactly what he was doing. He was waiting for me to justify myself, to explain my relationship with Estrella, to stake a claim in terms that he could then dispute. It was the same tactic as a hard tackle from behind — designed not necessarily to win the ball but to make you think about it the next time you ran.

“I understand,” I said, “that a father would want to know who is spending time with his son.”

Jorge looked pleased with this. “Precisely. Family. The connection between a father and⁠—”

“Of course,” I said, still pleasant, “that would require actually spending time with him yourself. To establish the baseline.”

The pleasant expression did not leave his face. But something shifted behind his eyes, a quick recalculation. He had expected, I thought, someone easier to manage.

Luz appeared in the doorway then, in the cautious way of a child who has learned to be cautious — not running, not calling out, just appearing, as if testing the air. She looked at Jorge with the studied neutrality of a six-year-old who had made her assessment of this man long before tonight.

“Tío Jorge,” she said. “Did you bring presents like last time?”

The last time, I had learned in a quiet conversation with Estrella weeks earlier, had been Christmas, more than a year ago. One visit.

“Not this time, pequeña,” Jorge said. “But next visit, perhaps.”

Luz considered this with the seriousness she brought to most negotiations. “You said that last time,” she observed, and went back to the kitchen.

After that, things moved quickly. Jorge shifted into what I suspected was his closing mode — the lawyer mention, the legal language, the cuffs straightened, the exit planned for maximum effect. He did not ask to see Pedro. He said goodbye to no one specific and left having planted everything he had come to plant.

When the door closed behind him, Estrella sat down on the couch as if her legs had simply decided to stop.

I sat beside her. I took her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and I could hear the effort it cost her not to cry — Estrella, who was never not composed in front of me unless she meant to be. “This is exactly what I didn’t want. My life spilling over onto you. Onto the children.”

I thought about what to say. I had prepared several versions of this conversation during the drive over, careful measured things about being prepared for complexity, about choosing this with full awareness. All of them felt, now, completely beside the point.

“Estrella,” I said. “I knew what I was walking into when I fell in love with you.”

She went very still.