“So, wait,” I said. “Is that legal?”

“People do it all the time down here,” Russ said. “To clean money, to hide money.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

Russ squeezed me tight. “This is the Caribbean, Rosie,” he said, as if it weren’t the only home I’d ever known.

Russ is in the business of money-laundering and tax evasion. I said I didn’t believe him capable of it, and once I pried a little more, he admitted that he’d taken the position at Ascension thinking it was 100 percent aboveboard, but once he’d figured out it wasn’t (in addition to everything else it did, the company invested money for some bad people—bad both morally and politically), it was too late. He was in too deep to protest.

“Then there’s the fact that both Todd and Stephen know about you,” he said.

Without a word, I got to my feet and bent down to kiss Russ on the cheek. “Be right back,” I said. I ascended the eighty steps to the villa, got in my car, and drove home.

I hate that I now know Russ is cheating the system—and yet, what did I expect? He’s cheating on his wife. I’m an integral part of the grand deception. I’m a lie. Maia is a lie. Mama was right, so right, to tell me to stay away from him. But had I listened? No. Three days after she was gone, I was back in his bed.

It’s over, I’ve decided.

When I kissed Maia as she lay sleeping, I thought, I am going to find a man who deserves to be your father.

February 14, 2017

The money still arrives in packages, only instead of depositing it in a bank account for Maia’s college, I’ve started stacking it neatly in the bottom drawer of my dresser. If the money is illegal, someone will trace it to my bank account eventually. Cash is safer.

Then, this weekend a text came to my phone from a foreign number. It said: Please come to the villa. I want to see you. Things will change, I promise.

I blinked, read the text again, read the text a third time. Russ had never texted me before. We’d both agreed cell phones weren’t safe.

Things will change, I promise. It wasn’t a text saying he had left Irene, but I gave in anyway. I ached with missing him.

March 2, 2017

Love is messy, complicated, and unfair.

Things have not changed in any way except that the villa is newly redone and Maia has been allowed to decorate one of the rooms as her own. Also, I finally came clean with Huck and Ayers and told them that, yes, there was a man—I even said his name out loud once—but my relationship was nobody’s business but my own.