When I got to the ground floor, I slammed through the stairwell door and sprinted for the bank of elevators, nearly colliding with a kissing couple along the way.

But when the elevator door slowly opened, I stopped cold, my feet nearly sliding out from under me. I reached back and caught myself with one hand on the wall, and then backed up and pressed myself into a room doorway, making myself as thin as I could get, so I wouldn’t be seen. I poked my head around the corner and watched, my legs weakened by what I saw.

The white-blond man stepped off the elevator and slowly, deliberately, stalked out of the hotel.

19

THINGS WERE PRETTY strained between Chris and me on the way to Angry Elephant. He sipped on his coffee petulantly, and I silently seethed that he hadn’t brought me one. Even though we both knew I wouldn’t drink it. Couldn’t, after all this time of rejecting his coffees. It was my thing.

Most of our sentences were logistics-related. Do you know where you’re going? I’ve got the GPS programmed. Watch out for that car. Do you see that pothole? Do you mind if I turn on the radio? Nope. Do whatever you want.

It was so uncomfortable, the giant cinnamon roll I’d gotten from room service balled up into an angry wad in my stomach.

I didn’t tell Chris about seeing the white-blond man back at the Luxor. I didn’t, mostly because I was afraid of where my mind would take me if I began to consider what might have happened if he’d still been standing there when I foolishly threw open the door, thinking it was Chris looking for his jacket. Plus, I didn’t really get the best look at him. He could have been any number of blond men, and the only reason I saw him as the blond man was because he was on my mind. After all, that was part of why I was here in the first place, wasn’t it? To find out who he was and what he had to do with my parents.

I yawned. I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d been too busy tossing and turning, thinking about Heriberto and Leon and Rebecca and how Chris fit into all this. Why he didn’t arrest Heriberto and be done with it. At some point just shy of dawn, it occurred to me.

Just a few minutes before reaching our destination, the thought got the better of me and I couldn’t keep from saying it any longer. “It’s because you were in love with her, isn’t it?” I asked.

Chris, who had been staring out the passenger window, turned. “What? Who?”