“I don’t. I’m not. I’m . . . sorry?”

“Always with the question mark,” he teased.

My hands slid back around my coffee mug, close to his.

“Well, what changed your mind?”

Dex gave the question some thought, then said, “Look, it’s fun to flirt. And you are really good at it.”

“I try.”

“But that’s just surface stuff. Tonight, on the farm—that was a real conversation.”

“So, you’re saying this whole time I could have just screamed at some corn, and that would have won you over?”

He stretched his fingers out to hook over mine and gave me another lopsided smile.

“Let’s just say that pretty and strange are a winning combo.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” I said. “But watch it.”

We talked until our coffee turned cold, and when the clock wound round to a number I thought would worry Reg and piss off Sal, I told Dexter we had to call it a night. He agreed and excused himself to use the restroom first.

I paced the shop alone while I waited for him, taking in the photos from every inch of the world. Here was Lina on a boat, sea-foam churning in an impossibly aqua sea; there she was on the Spanish Steps, drenched in sunlight; here she stood atop a snow-covered mountain; there she sat surrounded by children in a remote island village.

How did the woman travel so much and still manage a business? It was more places than anyone could visit in a lifetime.

I froze.

It was more places than anyone could visit in a lifetime.

My eyes raked over the photos again. The locations, timeless. The fashion? Not so much. Lina’s face was virtually unchanged from image to image, but the threads she wore spanned decades. Most of her outfits were classic, almost deliberately basic, so you had to really know something about clothing to see it, but once I noticed, it was as clear as a moonlit night. Nobody’s closet had that much vintage—not even mine.

Lina had been to all these places in a single lifetime. Just not a human one.

“See any place you want to go, princess?”

I jumped at the sound of her voice, knocking clumsily into a nearby chair.

The kitchen door she’d come through was still swinging closed, and she was already beside me. I didn’t have to ask how she’d appeared so quickly. I’d done it myself a million times over the years. But I had other questions—so many I didn’t know which to ask first, but before I could get even one out, Dexter was emerging from the bathroom, drying his hands on his jeans.

“Hey, Lina, you’re out of towels in the men’s room.”

Ugh. He was cute, but we’d have to work on that timing.