I know what I said, and I know what it means. I met Mary Colonia before we’d set up St. Easy. I would have helped her, but I didn’t have a place to send her. She went back to the Colonia because she missed her children. It was a carefully planned story that was all true, but with parts left out.

“That paper says she was severed after that, which means she came back here. Just like I told you.”

“Please tell me you saw her after. That she survived it.”

“You’re looking for hope, Sarah. I don’t have any to offer.”

“You said she was alive.”

“Maybe she is.”

She’s supposed to act as if she despises me, but it doesn’t seem like an act now.

She hates me. She’ll never forgive me. She’s lost to me. And all I have are the truths I can tell, balanced against the ones I can’t.

Our eyes meet. She takes down the severance paper. I’m sure I’ve lost her to this chemical change I can’t pin down, but she’ll gut me before revealing where those women are.

With the glass between us, I’m in no position to soothe her. She knows it. Yet here she is, driven by a loss that was never fully explained.

“I lost my mother too.” The words aren’t out of my mouth before I regret how pathetic I sound. “I spent my life avenging her death.”

“That’s done now.” She leans into the glass, tipping her toes and her chin so that her mouth tips toward the open space between us. Her lips are wet with tears as she whispers, “Tell me what you know, Dario. Tell me anything.”

She’s playing a dangerous game. Anything I say will be assumed to be true. This is the moment they’ve been waiting for… when I tell my wife what they all want to know.

Even if I whisper in a voice too low for any microphone in the world to pick up, they’ll hurt her for the information they think I relayed.

“Do you really want to know?” I whisper with my lips close to hers, bordered by the lines of the glass.

As if she were under a spell and my breath hitting her mouth was the elixir, the red in her face drains away, and she realizes she’s demanding information that will end not just St. Eustatius and all the women on it, but us. Our marriage, our love, our lives.

I know what’s changed about her.

She’s not innocent anymore.

It’s for the best. I pushed for an end to her wide-eyed inexperience, but I hate that I took it from her, and I hate that I have to nail the lid shut on it.