Ask Her About Mexico City

Kade Brennan doesn't get back in the car.

Ibarra settles into the back seat, already on his phone, waving at you through the tinted glass, and his driver stays on the sidewalk in the noon glare with his hands in his pockets like he's got all day. Up close he's handsome in the way of men in cologne ads: sandy hair, a jaw you could sharpen knives on, a sunburned nose, a grin that he clearly knows works.

"Heard you went private," he says to Morgan. "Didn't believe it. Thought you'd be teaching rookies at Leonard Wood till they buried you there."

"Didn't think you'd be driving," Morgan says.

"I'm not driving. I'm consulting." He winks at you. "Mr. Ibarra likes a little extra muscle at the terminal these days. Times being what they are." He holds out a hand to you. "Kade."

You shake it because your mother raised you to shake hands with snakes. His palm is warm and dry.

"Ethan."

"Oh, I know. The rooftop. Big fan." He hangs onto your hand a second too long, squeezing, like a test. "You're in good hands with the Sergeant, by the way. Best there is." He lets go. His eyes slide to Morgan, still smiling. "Most of the time."

Morgan doesn't move. Something in the stillness of her makes the hair rise on your arms.

"Kade," Ibarra calls from inside the car. "Vámonos."

"Duty calls." Kade backs toward the driver's door, then pauses, one hand on the roof, and says it to you, light, like a joke between friends. "Hey. Ask her about Mexico City sometime."

The door shuts. The Mercedes pulls away into traffic, sun flashing off the chrome.

You turn to Morgan. "What happened in Mexico City?"

"Car's this way," she says.

"Morgan."

It's the first time you've used her first name. She hears it. You see it land in her shoulders. But she just opens the SUV door for you, and her face is a locked room.

"Nothing that's going to happen to you," she says.

She doesn't talk on the drive. She doesn't talk at the condo while you change shirts three times for your show. She stands in the hallway with her phone, typing, and once you hear her say Denise, I need everything on Brennan's last two years in a voice like a door closing.

The gallery is a converted tire shop in Wynwood, between a mural of a giant blue octopus and a place that sells forty-dollar candles. It's your first real show. Twelve prints, all night photography: the Brickell skyline reflected in a puddle, a fisherman asleep on the Rickenbacker, steam rising off the Miami River at four a.m., the cranes of Terminal 4 lit up red and white like a mechanical forest. You shot them over two years of insomnia. You called the show Who's Watching, which seemed clever six weeks ago.

Now it seems like a dare.

Morgan walks the room before anyone else is allowed in. Then she takes up a post by the back wall where she can see the door, the bar and you, and doesn't move again.

People come. Simone in gold, shrieking. Friends from Low Tide. Two collectors your mother sent, who you suspect have been ordered to buy something. A food blogger with twelve million followers. Your ex, Jules, in a linen slip dress with a camera around her neck, kissing your cheek like nothing ever happened.

"Who's that?" Jules says, looking past you.

You don't need to turn. Every person in the room who has looked at the back wall has said some version of it.

"Security."

"Your security looks like a perfume ad."

"Your security looks like a perfume ad," Simone says, appearing at your elbow, "and I'm going to need her to stop leaning on my emotional support wall. She's distracting the collectors."

"She's not leaning. She doesn't lean. She stands."

"She sure does." Simone sips her wine, watching Morgan the way you'd watch a storm on the radar. "She hasn't taken her eyes off you once, you know."

"That's her job."

"Uh-huh."

You go to the bar. You talk. You sell two prints, the puddle and the fisherman, to strangers who seem to actually like them, which is so much better than selling to your mother's friends that you almost cry. You've had a glass and a half of wine and a whole evening of not thinking about pillows, and you're almost happy when you walk down the back row to say thank you to the gallery owner.

You stop in front of the last print.

It should be the cranes. Terminal 4, 3:12 a.m. Your favorite. The one you almost didn't hang because it felt like making peace with your mother.

The frame is the same. The little white card is the same.

The photograph is not.

It's your living room. Lamp low. The couch turned the wrong way, toward the door. And on it, asleep, one arm across her stomach, boots still on, her face softer than you've ever seen it in daylight, is Morgan.

The angle is high. From the ceiling. From the corner where the ceiling meets the wall above your kitchen.

Someone has been inside your apartment since she moved in. Someone stood in your home, or worse, didn't need to, and watched the one person whose job it is to watch you, while she slept.

You don't scream. You don't do anything. You stand in front of it with your wine glass tilting in your hand until it spills over your fingers, cold.

Then she's there. You didn't hear her cross the room. Her hand on your elbow, light, and then her eyes go to the print, and you watch every drop of color leave her face.

"Don't touch it," she says.

"It's you."

"I know."

"That's my ceiling. That's my living room. Morgan, someone was..."

"I know." Her jaw is tight enough to break. She's already turning, scanning the gallery, the doors, the faces. "Who handled the frames?"

"The gallery. They hung them yesterday. I don't know."

"Okay." She takes a photo of the print with her phone. Then of the wall card. Then of the crowd. Then, very gently, she takes the wine glass out of your hand and sets it on a bench. "We're leaving."

"I can't just walk out of my own show..."

"You can. Or I can call the police and we can stand here while they do it." Her voice softens a degree. "Your choice, Ethan. Either way, we're not sleeping at the Marlow tonight."

You look at the print again. Her sleeping face. The ceiling. The angle.

"Where would we even go? My mother's?"

"No."

"A hotel?"

"No." Something moves behind her eyes, a decision made against her own better judgment. "Somewhere nobody would think to look for a Prado."

"Where?"

Morgan picks up your jacket from the back of a chair and holds it open for you.

"My grandmother's," she says.