CHAPTER THREE - The Aurelia

The island took eleven hours and a nine-seater plane with a pilot who ate a sandwich during descent, and when the door opened the heat came in like something with opinions.

Astera Cay was thirty miles of volcanic green sticking out of water so improbably blue it looked filtered. One hotel. The Aurelia — an old white sugar house built into the cliff with a stepped garden falling away below it, bougainvillea eating the balconies, and a bar that had been carved out of the rock so that the sea got in at high tide and sighed under the floor.

Twenty-one guests. Eva counted. The point of Astera Cay was that it was very hard to get to and very expensive to stay at, and she had spent a sum of money she did not want to think about because she had wanted, specifically, to be somewhere where no one could arrive by accident.

The first attempt was a catastrophe.

His name was Brad, he sold orthopaedic devices in Scottsdale, and he was extremely sunburned. Eva had decided over breakfast that she was going to be Bold, in a way she'd mapped out on the plane, and so at four in the afternoon, at the pool, she walked up to a stranger with her heart going like a bird in a box and said:

"Hi. I like your — I'm going to be honest, I don't like anything about you, that was going to be a compliment and I couldn't land it."

There was a silence of roughly a thousand years.

Brad said: "Are you okay?"

"Yep," said Eva. "Yes. Sorry. Sorry. Enjoy your —"

She pointed at his drink and walked into the pool bar, where she stood in the cool dark behind a pillar with both hands over her face and laughed in total silent agony until her ribs hurt.

Good, she thought, when she could think. Good. That was the worst possible version. Now it's done and you can stop being afraid of it.

And that was, she would think later, the actual beginning of everything.

Because the thing about Eva Cross was that she was not, in fact, a shy person. She had never been shy. Shyness is a fear of being seen, and Eva had spent a decade being extremely visible in rooms full of men who owned museums; she could walk into a conference and take a room apart. What she had was not shyness. What she had was a wall, and walls are structures, and structures can be surveyed.

So she surveyed it.

By day three she had stopped trying to be Bold and started doing the thing she was actually world-class at, which was paying ferocious, patient attention.

She noticed that when she asked a question and then stopped talking, men filled the silence, and that the filling told you everything. She noticed that she could hold eye contact about two beats longer than the general population found comfortable, a skill acquired in a kitchen with yellow cabinets, and that deployed at a bar it did something to people's breathing. She noticed that if she touched the stem of her glass while someone was talking, they looked at her hand.

She tried it on the German diver. She tried it on the chef. She tried it, disgracefully, on a married man of sixty who was so delighted to be flirted with that she felt like a public service.

It was, she thought, astonishing. Eleven years of believing she had already been inside that building and found the rooms empty, and here it was, full of furniture, and every stick of it for sale.

On day four she found the heart.

The Aurelia had a library, because of course it did — the owner was a Belgian collector who came twice a year and otherwise let his house be a hotel, and his hobbies were all over it. Sea charts. A meteorite in a bell jar. An entire wall of butterflies in cases, which Eva found grim.

And in the deep window recess, alone on black velvet under glass, the thing.

It was a reliquary heart. About the size of a big man's fist, and shaped like an actual anatomical heart — not the Valentine shape, the real one, with the great vessels cut off short at the top. Gold, but the gold was a shell over something else, and the something else was black glass. Not obsidian. Glass. She knew the difference in her spine before she knew it in her head.

And there was a fracture.

It ran from the notch at the top, around and down, and it was so fine that at first she thought it was a scratch on the display case. She put her face almost against the glass. Her breath fogged it and she wiped it with her sleeve and looked again.

Her hands started to itch.

And something else did too, which she noted with clinical irritation, because she had come down to the library at eleven at night specifically to stop thinking about a man's mouth on her throat and had apparently brought the whole problem with her.

She had tried, upstairs, an hour ago. That was the humiliating part. She had lain on the bed with the fan going and her hand where she wanted it and got about ninety seconds in before the thing happened that always happened — the ceiling, the polite spectator, the small cold voice asking who exactly she thought she was performing for — and she had given up and put a dress on and come downstairs.

So: the heart. The heart was better. The heart was the one place in her entire life where she had never once gone away.

That sounds like a figure of speech. It wasn't. It was a physical event that had happened perhaps six times in her working life and every single time it had meant the same thing: there is a problem here and you are the person who can solve it. Her fingers actually flexed. Her thumb found the callus on her middle finger and pressed it.

Ines, the manager, found her there forty minutes later, still standing.

"You like our heart."

"Who's tried to close it?" said Eva, without turning around.

"I'm sorry?"

"The fracture. Somebody's tried to close that. There's — do you see the sheen, there, along the line? That's not dirt, that's the ghost of a consolidant. Somebody put an adhesive in there and it's failed and they've cleaned it back out. That's not amateur work either, that's a good hand. Who was it?"

There was a pause.

"Four people," said Ines slowly. "In twenty years. Monsieur Adriaan brings someone about every five years. The last one was from a museum, in Munich, a very famous man. He stayed nine days. He was very unhappy when he left."

Eva turned around.

"I'm a restorer."

"I know," said Ines, and smiled slightly at Eva's face. "It's a twenty-one-guest hotel, Miss Cross. We read the booking forms."

"Let me look at it."

"You're on holiday."

"Ines."

"You're on holiday," said Ines, amused, and then, after a moment: "I'll write to him."

That night Eva went down to the rock bar and the bartender was on.

She had noticed him on the first evening and filed him and taken him out of the file about nine times since. Teo. Local, twenty-eight or so, lean in that way that comes from actual work rather than a gym, with forearms she had thought about at some length and an unhurried way of moving behind a bar that suggested a man with no interest whatsoever in impressing anybody.

The tide was in. The sea was breathing under the floor.

"You've been in the library," he said, not looking up from the ice.

"Have I got dust on me?"

"You've got the face. Ines says you argued with her about a paperweight."

"It's not a paperweight," said Eva. "It's the most interesting object within two thousand miles and it's being kept in a window, in direct sun, next to a hundred dead butterflies."

Teo laughed. He had a great laugh, low and surprised, and he put a drink in front of her that she hadn't ordered.

"What's this?"

"It's what you'd have ordered in an hour."

And Eva looked at him for two beats longer than was comfortable, and watched his hand stop on the bar.

Oh, she thought. There it is.

Later — much later, when the bar was empty and the lamps were down to the last two and the sea was loud — they were on the stone steps that went from the bar down to the black sand, and her back was against the warm rock wall, and he was close enough that she could smell lime and salt and clean sweat on him.

He said: "Tell me if you want me to stop."

"I'll tell you."

And then his mouth was under her jaw.

She had not been prepared for what that did.

It was not a kiss. That was the thing. He didn't kiss her mouth at all, not for a long time; he just put his mouth on the hinge of her jaw and stayed there, breathing, and then moved down the line of her throat with a slowness that was frankly rude, and the whole world went out like a lamp. Her head went back against the rock. Her hands came up and gripped — the wall, not him — and something turned over low in her belly and kept turning, a slow heavy roll like a boat coming off its mooring.

She heard a sound and understood after a moment that it was her.

He stopped at the base of her throat, where the pulse was, and stayed there, and said her name against her skin, and she felt it in her knees.

Her body said yes.

That was the discovery, and it came down on her like a roof. Two years of a man in her bed and she had never once been in it with him. And now a stranger she had known four days put his mouth on her throat on a set of stone steps, and her body said yes — immediately, without negotiation, wholly and greedily and with an appetite that frightened her. She had not gone anywhere. She was still in her own skin, entirely and humiliatingly present, down to the fingernails.

His hand moved to her waist. Warm through the linen. He waited there. He was, she noted with distant approval, being extremely good about this.

She wanted him to move it. She wanted, with a violence that made her light-headed, to be taken apart on these steps by a man whose surname she didn't know.

And her hands stayed closed.

They were fists against the rock. She looked at them — actually turned her head and looked — and they were white at the knuckles, and she couldn't open them, and it was not fear. She wanted him. She was not afraid of him. She simply could not make her hands let go of the wall, as if some deep ancient animal part of her had decided that the hands were the last gate and the hands were not going to be opened by anybody tonight.

"Hey," said Teo, against her collarbone. "Still there?"

Eva breathed out.

"I need to stop."

He stopped instantly. Stood back half a step, hands up and open, and had the grace not to look injured.

"Okay."

"It's not —"

"It doesn't have to be anything," he said. "You want a glass of water?"

She started laughing then, breathless, one hand over her eyes, because the whole thing was so absurd and so kind and so exactly not the story she had been told her whole life about what men do when you stop.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah. I want a glass of water."

She went up at two. She didn't go to bed.

She went into the library instead, barefoot, and put the lamp on low, and stood in front of the black glass heart with her arms folded and her pulse still up and the print of a man's mouth still on her throat.

Nine days to her birthday.

"What are you," she said to it.

And the fracture ran from the notch at the top, around and down, and caught the lamplight like a hair.