Two Can Play (Celeste and Dominic) novel Chapter 546

I nodded. "You do not have to explain yourself to me. Since the day I met you, you have done nothing but try to help me. I trust you."

And then the tears came, all at once, and I could not stop them. "I cannot believe she slapped me."

Lucia pulled me into her arms and held me against her shoulder, one hand smoothing slow circles into my back, and I cried into her dress.

The five of us waited by the pool, and nobody spoke, because there was nothing left to say that had not already been said, and the night air had turned cold enough that my breath came out white when I finally let it go.

Lucia kept one arm hooked around my shoulders as though she were holding me upright, and the three women behind her had gone quiet in the way people go quiet when they are waiting for a car. Somewhere inside the hotel a door closed and the sound carried across the water, and every time I blinked I could still feel the print of Scarlett's h and across my cheek. I had stopped crying by then. My face was stiff with the dried salt of it and with the two slaps, and I had begun to think about nothing at all, which was a kind of relief.

The limousine came back the way it had left, long and black and slow down the drive, and it stopped under the awning with its lights still burning. Sparrow stepped out first, and behind him came two women in red uniforms, one carrying a long garment box and the other a smaller case with silver clasps. They walked the way people walk when they are paid to be quick, straight-backed and unhurried, and not one of them looked at me, or at Lucia, or at the three women who had laughed at my aunt while she knelt. Then Scarlett came out through the lobby doors with Sparrow's jacket still hanging off her shoulders, and he took the long bag from the first woman and held it out to her.

"He is fixing her up," she whispered. "Look at the boxes. He had them sent for."

I did not answer. I watched the lobby instead, the warm gold light, the blur of marble, the two women moving around Scarlett behind the glass like they were dressing a window for the street.

Ten minutes. That was all it took, and when Scarlett came back through those doors, I stopped breathing for a second, and I was not the only one. She wore black, a dress cut from the same cloth as Sparrow's suit, the same midnight wool with the same quiet weight in it, so that the two of them standing near each other looked less like a couple than like two halves of one order placed by the same hand. It sat high at the neck and low at the back and followed her waist and her hips the way water follows a slope, no ribbon, no bead, nothing that asked to be looked at, and that was exactly why I could not look anywhere else. Her hair had been lifted off her shoulders and pinned so the red caught the lobby light and threw it back, and her face had been done in shades so close to her own skin that she looked born that way while the rest of us had been painted on. Silver at her ears, silver at her wrist, silver shoes that turned her ankles into something a man might write poetry about.