Chapter 3: Nobody Else Can See It.

Ruby POV

“Ruby? Babe, did you hear me?”

Cesare was smiling down at me with fireworks still cracking over the harbour behind the curtains. I had not heard a word he said.

The window was still there, hanging in the air between his face and mine. The white letters sat perfectly still while the coloured light from outside slid across his cheek and over the wall behind him.

I blinked, and the window stayed exactly where it was.

I turned my head toward the ceiling, and it moved with me, floating in front of my eyes at the same height and the same distance.

I lifted my hand and reached for it. My fingertips went straight through the word Goal and touched nothing at all.

Cesare laughed and caught my wrist. “What are you doing?”

“Eyelash,” I said, and rubbed the corner of my eye with my knuckle. “It’s gone now.”

He kissed my fingers before letting my hand go, then rolled onto his back with one arm folded behind his head. His eyes passed right through the window while he looked up at the ceiling, and nothing in his face showed that he saw it.

“I need some water,” I told him.

I slid out of bed and walked to the bathroom without hurrying. I locked the door behind me, turned the cold tap on full so that the sound of it filled the small room, and gripped the edge of the sink with both hands.

The window had followed me in. It hung over the basin with the mirror behind it, and through it I could see my own face. The girl in the glass had soft cheeks with no cracked skin on her lips. The copper dye I would cut out of my hair in April was still there at the ends.

I leaned close to the mirror and kept my voice under the noise of the tap.

“What are you?”

The window did not change.

“Who sent you?”

Nothing changed. The letters sat there in their pale square.

“Close,” I whispered.

The window faded out of the air as if someone had turned down a lamp. For a few seconds I was alone with the running water and my own breathing. Then I thought about the goal and the window rose up again in front of me with the same lines on it.

[Goal: Secure a building in your own name.]

[Time limit: 13 days, 23 hours]

I sat down on the edge of the bath and made myself think it through.

A building in my own name, inside two weeks, and I had almost no money that was mine. Papà paid my salary, Papà owned the flat I was renting at a family discount, and most of what I had saved since university had gone into deposits for a wedding venue and a dress.

There was one building I knew better than any other in Castelmare. The old Ferrante cold store sat at the dead end of the docks with a bad roof over broken compressors. In the second of January it would go up for auction. In my first life Papà had bought it for almost nothing. I was the one who turned it into a depot yet I was the one who died outside its gate.

The building would have to wait until I had money.

I pressed my hands against my eyes and went back through the year I had already lived, looking for anything worth a lot to somebody.

The hottest week of July came back to me. By then the grid was running six hours a day, and a working generator was worth more than a car. A clerk from a bonded yard in Porto Sanna, an hour up the coast, rang the depot and asked me in a bored voice why Lovato Freight had never come to collect container LF-2271, which had been sitting in his yard since October under the name Lovato Freight.

I knew that container. It was forty diesel generators going south to a hospital supplier, and Papà had written it off as lost overboard in a storm.

By the time I drove up to Porto Sanna that July, the container was standing open with nothing inside it. Nobody at the yard would tell me who had emptied it.

The file on it would still be in the claims cabinet at the office.

I turned off the tap, flushed the toilet so that the noise would make sense, and went back to bed.

Cesare was already half asleep. He pulled me in against his side without opening his eyes. I lay there with my cheek on his shoulder, counting his breaths until they went slow and heavy.

At ten past three, he slid his arm out from under me an inch at a time. I kept my eyes shut with my mouth a little open, breathing deep and slow.

The mattress lifted as his weight left it. I heard the soft scrape of his jeans coming off the chair, the clink of his belt buckle, and the zip of his jacket. The phone screen lit up the inside of my eyelids, a dim glow that came and went while he used it with the brightness turned all the way down.

Then he leaned over the bed. His breath was warm on my forehead, and he kissed my hair.

“Work emergency,” he whispered. “Will be back soon babe.”

I kept my eyes shut.

His footsteps crossed the room and went down the hall. The front door opened onto the cold stairwell, and then it clicked shut behind him.

Come over so we can have fun.

I lay there and listened to his car start in the street below. When the sound of the engine had faded all the way down the hill toward my sister’s side of town, I sat up and wiped my mouth hard with the back of my hand, over and over, until my lips stung.

The taste of him was still there. I leaned over the side of the bed and spat on the floor where he had left his slippers.

“Go on, then,” I said to the empty room, and my voice came out low and flat. “Go and crawl into her bed, you pig. Enjoy every minute of it.”

I pulled the pillowcase off his pillow, carried it to the kitchen at arm’s length, and pushed it down to the bottom of the rubbish bin.

I did not sleep again. When the window behind the curtains turned from black to grey, I dressed in yesterday’s clothes and drove down to the docks through empty streets, past shuttered cafés with paper streamers still hanging in their windows.

Lovato Freight stood dark on the corner of Via del Porto. I let myself in through the side door with my old key a little after seven. The heating had been off for the holiday, and the cold inside the building sat on my skin like wet cloth.

I went straight up the stairs to the filing room at the back of the first floor and switched on the single desk lamp.

The cargo claims cabinet stood against the far wall. I pulled out the drawer for October and walked my fingers along the tabs until I found it.

The form said that container LF-2271 held forty diesel generators of two hundred kilowatts each, bound for Bellini Medical Supplies in the south. It said the container had gone overboard on the twenty third of October in heavy weather off the Capo Rosso light, and that Adriatica Insurance had paid the claim in full. At the bottom of the write-off was my father’s signature, with his usual heavy loop on the L.

A small routing slip was clipped to the back of the file. I unclipped it and held it under the lamp.

Handling broker: CR-0417.

I knew that code. I had typed it into a hundred contracts. It was Cesare’s.

My fingers went cold on the thin paper, and I read the number three times while the lamp buzzed beside me.

Downstairs, the front door banged open.

Boots stamped snow off on the mat in the hall. Someone shook out a coat, and then footsteps started up the stairs, slow and heavy on the old wood.

“Hello?” a man called from the landing. “Who’s in?”

Cesare? What was he doing here?

I stood at the open drawer with his routing slip in my hand as his footsteps came down the corridor and stopped outside the filing room door.