Page 7 of Inez

"I know."

"Then what is it you hope to find?" she asks, looking at me once again. "Who are you looking for, when you look at me the way you do?"

"Just…you."

"Why?"

"Because I love you." It is the only answer there can be.

"Then you love a ghost."

"No," I answer. I reach over, moving slowly and cautiously, and rest my hand on her knee; when she doesn't slice my hand off, I give her knee the gentlest of squeezes. "I love the woman you are now. Whatever name you choose. Wherever you are. Whoever you are. I have loved you since I first saw you and I have never stopped. I will never stop. I cannot."

She only shakes her head and resumes staring out the window, brooding. "I say it again, because it is the truth, Lorenzo: you love a ghost."

"Then I love a ghost. So what? I have asked you for nothing, Sophia…or Inez. Whichever. I will walk beside you wherever our paths lead. I'll fight with you. I'll fight for you. I'll kill for you. I'll die for you." I squeeze her knee again. "I ask for nothing. I would love nothing more than to hold you. To kiss you. To make love with you. But if you cannot give me any of that, so be it."

"Why?" she asks. "You have a choice. You don'thaveto cling to these feelings. You can give up on me. You can let go."

"Of course I have a choice." I capture her hand and bring it to my lips. "I choose you. Loving you is a choice and it's one I make every day."

"Why?Why, Lorenzo? We shared, what? A few months of stolen moments, more than fifteen years ago? Closer to twenty, is it not? Why? Why cling to the bones of a dead woman, Lorenzo?"

"I don't know. A lovely, deadly seventeen-year-old girl captured my heart and never gave it back. Maybe I'm just astubborn old fool, but…" I shrug, shake my head. "I don't know. I just know I love you, and I cannot, will not ever stop."

Her silence shifts, then. She tilts the seat all the way back and drapes her arm over her eyes. "I'm going to sleep for a while. Wake me up when it's my turn to drive."

My hand is still on her knee. That is a small but significant victory.

3

BROKEN PIECES

INEZ

Three a.m., somewhere just south of the border. We're at a gas station. I've been driving for the past five or so hours. Lorenzo is sprawled across the back seat, hat pulled over his eyes, snoring quietly. He stirred when I stopped at the fuel station, peered around, and went back to sleep.

My phone rings, an insistent buzz in my back pocket. I set the pump handle to dispense automatically and walk out of earshot before I answer. "Hello, sir."

"Inez." His deep, smooth, cultured voice washes across the line. "I apologize for the long delay. What’s the emergency?"

After the attack on the trucking garage, I sent him our prearranged code indicating that I had an emergency and I needed to speak with him ASAP.

"We have a serious problem, sir," I answer. "Rafael was not in Fresnillo."

"That is unsurprising, and therefore not the emergency, I assume."

"Correct. I was able to get some information from the survivors."

"Survivors of what, exactly?”

"We tracked what we thought were his movements to a trucking company in Fresnillo. It wasn't him, obviously, but it was his men. A lot of them, massing for some kind of attack. Lorenzo and I…neutralized them."

"How many?"

"I don't know. Thirty or forty. We didn't have a chance to do an exact count."

"And?"