“I daresay you’re right. But nobody is going to know.” He bent forward and blew out the flame. The darkness was complete, save only for the faintest of diffuse daylight glows from the stairwell. She could sense his heavy warmth, less than a hand’s breadth from her, and his breath was hot on her cheek.

He backed away, his tunic rustling softly. “Now we share a secret.” He laughed, and his feet clattered on the stairs. She followed him into the daylight, but when she reached the ground, he had gone.

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Miami Airport was a thoroughly unpleasant place. The queues of grimy adults and unhappy kids before the immigration barriers were as long and slow moving as I could remember in any American airport.

I’d taken many trips to the States over the years, for work, vacations—and in pursuit of my sister. After going to work in America some fifteen years before, Gina had come home only a handful of times, most recently, and even then grudgingly, for our father’s funeral. Her two boys were the only kids in the family—that I knew of, I reminded myself, thinking of Rosa. They had quickly become precious to me, no doubt through some mixture of sentiment and genetic longing. But to get to see them, every time I had to endure these red-eye flights and the ferocity of U.S. immigration controllers.

Outside the terminal, the weather seemed unseasonably humid and hot for October. Nobody was there to greet me, of course. I took a cab from the airport to my hotel in Miami Beach. I was only maybe twenty miles from my sister. But taking a hotel room was my habit. I’d long learned not to put unnecessary pressure on Gina by actually having her put me up, despite my having flown around the world to see her.

I generally stayed at Best Westerns, but for this trip I’d decided to spend a little money, and had used the Internet to find a room at a big spa hotel on the coast. The hotel’s air-conditioning was merciless, of course, and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees as I stepped through the sliding doors to reception. But I was pleased with the plush, sweeping interior, the atrium done out in tiles of chrome and purple, the huge sunken bar, the glimpses of chlorine-blue pools beyond wide glass doors. Meeting rooms in bays clustered around the atrium; evidently the hotel relied a lot on corporate business, and I wondered if Gina got much work here.

My room was on the twelfth floor. I turned on the TV and briskly unpacked. The room was big, expansive, with a balcony that gave a view of the sea—at least it did if you crowded right up against the rail, and peered past the flank of the building and across a busy highway. It was late afternoon, but as always after a transatlantic flight it was eerie to see the sun still stranded so high above the horizon. I’ve always found flying tough.