No Questions

You carry Stelio's box down the dock like it's full of explosives.

She's gone below by the time you get there. The companionway is empty, the hatch half-slid. You step aboard, set the box on the cockpit seat and stand there for a second with your heart thudding in your ears.

Then you go down the steps.

She's sitting at the little saloon table with her hands folded on top of it, very straight, like she's waiting for an interview. The cap is off. Without it the haircut is even worse, longer on the left than the right, hacked at the back. Without it, too, there's no mistaking the face. You've seen that face on stamps. On the sides of buses. On a commemorative tea towel in Stelio's kitchen.

"So," she says.

"So," you say.

"You saw."

"Everyone on Cardo saw. It's on every channel." You keep your voice low, though the hull is thick and the dock is quiet. "Your Royal Highness."

She flinches. Actually flinches, like the title is something thrown at her. "Please don't."

"What do you want me to call you?"

"Lena." She lifts her chin. "It was my grandmother's name for me. Nobody's used it since I was nine."

"Okay. Lena." You lean against the galley counter, head bent under the low deckhead, because your knees aren't sure about you. "You can't be here."

"I paid to be here."

"You paid a private citizen to help the heir to the throne disappear on her wedding day. I don't know what the law calls that, but I know it's not a charter." You pull the envelope from your jacket and set it on the table in front of her. It lands with a heavy, expensive sound. "Take your money. I'll walk you to the ferry. Nobody has to know you were here."

She doesn't look at the envelope. She looks at you.

Her eyes are amber in the middle and green at the edges, and right now they're very bright, and she is very carefully not crying. You can tell because you've seen people try not to cry before, in worse places than this. Her mouth is pressed so flat it's almost white.

"There's no ferry until noon," she says. "By noon there will be photographs of me at that ferry landing. By one there will be a car. By two I'll be back in a room in the Palazzo Aurenzo with a doctor telling the press how quickly I've recovered, and by next Saturday I'll be married." Her voice doesn't shake. That's the worst part. It's perfectly steady. "I'm not asking you to understand. I'm asking for a week."

"Why a week?"

"That's a question."

"Lena."

She looks down at her hands. "Because I have never had one," she says quietly. "Not one day that somebody else didn't plan. I'm twenty-six years old and I have never ordered my own coffee. Do you know that? Someone always knows how I take it before I do." A breath. "I want seven days where nobody knows how I take my coffee."

You don't say anything. You aren't sure what to say.

She pushes the envelope back across the table. "Please, Ethan."

It's the way she says your name. Like she's been holding it carefully since the dock and doesn't want to drop it.

"I can't, Lena," you say, and you mean it, and you hate that you mean it. "I'm sorry. I've been in trouble with the government before. I can't do it again. I can't lose this boat."

Something closes in her face, gently, like a door being shut so it won't wake anyone. She nods. She stands. She picks up the cap and puts it back on and tucks the ragged ends of her hair under it with quick, practiced fingers, and when she straightens up she's not Lena anymore. She's someone who has been taught how to walk out of a room.

"Of course," she says. "I'm sorry I asked. Keep the money for your trouble."

"I don't want—"

Then you hear it.

A low mechanical growl from the harbor mouth. Not a fishing boat. Fishing boats cough and rattle. This is a deep, even, expensive sound, the sound of twin diesels being throttled back.

You know that sound. You spent six years standing on decks that made it.

You climb two steps and look out through the companionway.

A coast guard cutter is nosing around the breakwater into Porto Vello. White hull, orange stripe, the crest of Marenza on the bow. Four crew on deck. One of them has binoculars up and is sweeping them slowly along the moored boats, left to right.

Coast guard cutters don't come to Porto Vello. There's nothing in Porto Vello worth guarding.

Behind you, very softly, Lena says, "Ethan. Is it for me?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

You do.

You watch the binoculars sweep. The fuel dock. Old Sandro's boat. The rotting ketch nobody has sailed in years. Closer. You think about the ferry at noon. The car at one. The room at two. You think about a woman who has never ordered her own coffee, standing on your dock at five in the morning holding out her whole life in an envelope.

You think about the last time you watched people in uniforms do something wrong and told yourself it wasn't your business.

It was your business. It cost you everything. You'd do it again.

"Forward cabin," you say.

"What?"

"Go to the forward cabin. Close the door. Lie down on the bunk and pull the blanket over you and don't come out until I say." You're already moving, sliding down the steps, grabbing the envelope off the table and shoving it into a locker. "If anyone comes aboard, you're a duffel bag."

She stares at you for half a second. Then she goes, quick and silent, and the little door clicks shut behind her.

You go up on deck. You start the engine. It catches on the second try, the way it always does, as if it's thinking about it. You step onto the dock and throw off the stern line, then the spring, moving the way you'd move on any morning, not fast, not slow. Stelio is on the bar terrace with a tray of cups, watching you with his mouth slightly open. You give him a little wave. He gives you a little wave back, very slowly, like a man who has just understood something and doesn't want to.

The cutter is idling in the middle of the harbor now. The binoculars land on you.

You lift a hand. Friendly. A charter skipper heading out early, one more unshaven man on one more old boat.

The binoculars stay on you a beat too long. Then they move on.

You throw off the bow line and step aboard and ease the Second Wind out of her slip, past the cutter's tall white side, close enough to read the hull number. You don't look up. You keep your hand light on the wheel and your speed at four knots, exactly harbor speed, a model citizen.

Past the fuel dock. Past the breakwater. Into open water, where the swell lifts the bow and the sun finally breaks over Isola Cardo and turns the whole sea to hammered gold.

Your hands are shaking. You let them.

Then you glance back at the harbor, and your stomach drops.

On the end of the fuel dock, small and thin in his harbor master's jacket, Fosco Bellini is standing very still, watching the Second Wind sail away. His phone is pressed to his ear.

He isn't saying anything. He's listening.