Dante's voice cooled. “You don't know me.”
“That's true.”
“You have no idea what happens if I lose that vote.”
“Also true.”
“So why aren't you afraid?”
Selene stared at the ten-year-old burn on her thumb from an accident in the university archive, then at Dante's carefully guarded face.
“I am afraid,” she said. “I'm speaking anyway.”
He looked down at the page. After a moment, he turned it over.
On the reverse, just visible under the restaurant's amber light, lay a faint water stain in the shape of a narrow crescent. Below it, in a different hand, someone had added three short words.
Selene recognized the first two. She went very still.
“Don't look for gold,” she whispered.
Dante's chair scraped against the floor. “What?”
“That's a preliminary reading, not a translation. I'd need to test it.” Her throat tightened. “But if I'm right, your father wasn't giving you a location.”
“Then what was he giving me?”
She looked up. “A warning.”
At the edge of the room, a guest rose abruptly from his chair. He was an older man with silver-rimmed spectacles and a dark green pocket square. His name was Carmine Orsini; Selene knew because Henderson had warned the staff never to address him first.
Carmine's glass remained untouched as he approached.
“Dante,” he said softly, “you should put that away.”
Dante turned. “Why?”
“Because your father had enemies, and some of them are still alive.”
Selene watched the man's attention flick from the parchment to the name printed on her badge. Recognition passed over his face, fast and unmistakable.
“Rostova,” he said. “From Cambridge?”
The blood seemed to leave Selene's fingertips.
She had changed cities, jobs, and nearly everything else a person could change without becoming a liar. She had not changed her name because her father had given it to her, and she had already lost enough.
Carmine's expression smoothed into politeness.
“I thought you looked familiar. Tell me, Dr. Rostova. Have they started letting you back into universities yet?”
Dante looked between them.
Selene understood then that the danger was not the ten million dollars. It was the possibility that someone had been waiting for the parchment to reach her hands.
THE LANGUAGE OF FIRE
THE WOMAN BENEATH THE HONOR WALL
THE ROSES THAT REMEMBERED
Reader question: If speaking up could destroy the quiet life you had rebuilt, would you still tell the truth?
*And before the restaurant closed, the man who recognized Selene would make a phone call that turned her old disgrace into a present threat.*
The manager did fire Selene the next morning.
He called at eight twelve, before she had taken off her winter coat after the bus ride home. He said Loro valued discretion and that last night's disturbance had put an important business relationship at risk. He was sorry. He would send her final pay by Friday.
Selene wrote down his words. She had learned to write things down when the first disciplinary investigator at Cambridge had told her that her memory differed from everybody else's.
Then she went to the grocery store, bought a discounted loaf of rye bread, and called the only lawyer who had never asked her whether she was secretly guilty.
Mara Chen answered on the fourth ring. “If you're about to tell me you haven't paid your electricity bill, I already know.”
“Someone offered me ten million dollars to translate a manuscript.”
There was a pause.
“That's a new approach to debt management.”
“He runs a criminal organization.”
“Of course he does. The decent ones offer research grants.”
Selene sat down on a bench outside the grocery store. The wind off the lake went straight through her coat.