Page 25

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 1

It’s strange you can’t hear it on the street, Anema e Core, because inside the club, it’s impossible to hear anything else. The music is so loud that it thrums through me, straight down my esophagus, like I’ve swallowed it whole.

But then, you don’t need to hear in here. The bottle service comes without having to ask. There are sparklers that seem like they might catch the filmy thin dresses on fire. All of us are sweating and swaying, and Helen and Freddy are working their way through a second bottle of vodka that I never even saw someone order.

Anema e Core is the kind of place that has made a business out of anticipating desire.

On the dance floor, bodies move with impossible speed in the dim light—arms lifted overhead, hips grinding, chests heaving. Sasha, Martina, and Giulia are out there somewhere—without Stan, I hope, for their sake. But he’s here, somewhere. Circling.

This is the night we planned for. It’s arrived on a platter—the drinking, the late hour, the crowds. But I can’t get Helen’s texting out of my mind. I can’t separate her from her last name, her family. From the reality that people like her don’t think twice about fucking over someone like me. Even with the exit in sight, I feel trapped.

The band plays a song Freddy knows and he sings it, at the top of his voice, his cheeks flushed, and I try to remind myself she isn’t likehim.

It’s almost three in the morning. Naomi, Marcus, and Richard left after we finished the first bottle of champagne. Marcus nodded at me when they left; he’ll be back with the money soon.

“Let’s dance,” Freddy says. He grabs Helen’s wrist, and I watch them make their way to the center of the scrum.

Thirty minutes ago, I watched him do a bump out in the open, between bottle girls. Now Freddy says: You’re gorgeous. I can’t hear him, but I can read his lips. As he says the word gorgeous, he falls to his knees. It’s ridiculous, but Helen loves it. They’re drunk.

It makes me nervous how drunk she is, because it only means one thing: she’s nervous, too.

Somehow, the room gets smokier, more sparklers, more hash, more cigarettes. But the dancing doesn’t let up. Song after song, Helen and Freddy keep at it. I’m thinking of getting some fresh air when Marcus texts me: I’m on my way back. Simultaneously, Helen checks her phone and walks away from the dance floor, toward the back of the club. Freddy, in ecstasy, fills her absence with other bodies. I can’t help it, I see him as he once was, addicted, partying, absorbing the adulation of dozens of girls who knew his father led one of the largest hedge funds in town.

I was one of them once.

It all feels too familiar—this life, these people, Stan in the shadows. I stand and make my way to the back of the club, passing knots of celebrities. People I recognize. People Freddy held up a hand to, kissed cheeks with, when we entered. I can’t quite make them out through the heat and the haze, and I bet they love that.

Capri is funny that way—a place you come to be seen and a place you come to disappear. So many big names around that you can slip into the background if you want to, or push yourself to the front. Armloads of bags from Hermès or Gucci. Secluded villas or front row on the Piazzetta. Every day a different set of options.

I want to stop and stare—who wouldn’t?—but I keep moving, looking for Helen’s blond hair, her brilliant smile. But when I see her, I don’t understand what’s going on. She’s in the shadows of the club, her body pressed up against a man in a white T-shirt and loose, brightly colored shorts. His skin is tan, and when he looks up, I recognize him immediately from the boat.

Ciro.

I take two steps in her direction. But then I pause. I watch Helen tilt her chin up, and when she does, Ciro grabs the side of her face, his thumb pressed into the satisfying fatty hollow below her cheekbone. Then he kisses her. Her hands are on his face, in his hair. Arms wrapped around his back. If she could pull him into her, she would.

I look at the dance floor, but even if Freddy were looking straight at them, it’s too hazy for him to see what’s going on. And too late for me to understand what this means for us.

It’s all bravado, she told me about Ciro. It’s a bad joke, she said to him.

It would have stayed a joke if I had just listened to her, trusted her. But then, she never told me about Ciro. And it’s startling, the realization that I am not the only one with secrets. That neither of us has fully trusted the other. That she might have a fallback. Like me. I’m as impressed as I am alarmed.

When Helen and Ciro come up for air, I head in the opposite direction, away from Freddy, away from the celebrities and the girls trying to get picked up. I duck into the bathroom, or try to, but the line is out the door.

“Scusa!” calls out the girl at the front of the line, but I hold up my hand.

She’s seen this emergency before.

I push through, desperate to splash water on my face, run it across my wrists. To figure out what all this means for me. I still have Stan. I still have money coming. I think about Martina, Giulia, and Sasha. I still have options. At the sink, I realize I’m gripping the edge of the basin so tightly that my thumb has begun to bleed through its stitches. A little tendril of blood, oozing across the porcelain, mixing with the water, turning it pink.

“Oh fuck, Lorna.”

Helen has come up behind me, and she passes me a fistful of paper towels.

“Did you pop a stitch?”

She takes my hand in hers, and I can’t help it. I examine her cheek to see if he left a fingerprint. But there’s nothing there, just clear, flushed skin—a gloss of sweat.

Ciro.

This is why he was so quick to save her. Would he have killed me if I had held her under longer? Does he know about tonight?

“Lorna,” she repeats. “Did you pop a stitch?”

I pull the paper towels back and look at the wound—all three black stitches are still in place.

“No.”

Helen laughs, and when there’s a gap in the line, she slips into a bathroom stall, pulls me in with her. The space is tight and our knees knock together.

“He said tonight, didn’t he?” she asks.

Her voice is a whisper, her lips pressed close to my ear. I thought they might have told her, that they might have discussed it as a family.

I nod. “He’s on his way back,” I say.

I have less than thirty minutes to decide if I trust her. Or if I trust Stan. Or if I should leave them both and walk away, with or without the money. But at least with my life.

“Do you have everything you need? You know the address?”

I repeat the address in Naples back to her.

She’s flushed, her pupils dilated.

“Then after,” she says, spreading her hand wide, but her knuckle connects with the metal wall of the stall, “we can go to Rome, we can go to London, we won’t ever have to go back to L.A. Not if we don’t want to.”

“You’re getting loud,” I say.

Because she is, and because it makes me jumpy to see Helen like this: loose, like things might spill out of her mouth, her dress, her past. I know people like her, families like hers. They don’t understand consequences, only punishments.

“It’s finally here,” she says, her voice a hiss.

I nod.

“They deserve it,” she says.

They all do.

Someone bangs on the bathroom stall door and Helen calls out:

“Momento per favore!”

We’ve been over the mechanics of this a hundred times: the money, the boat, the drop. There was always going to be a night when I had to choose.

Helen unlocks the stall door and drags me back through the club, past the celebrities, past the dark corner where Ciro stood minutes before, and onto the dance floor, where one of the girls—Martina—grins at me. I join her for a few bars of the song, literally trying to shake off the evening, the trip, my life. Our hips and feet move at the same time. She rests a pencil thin forearm on my shoulder and yells the lyrics at me in thickly accented English. I yell them back.

You can forget anything if you work at it hard enough.

Another song goes by, and then another. After the fourth, I retreat to the table, where the bottle of vodka is floating in a bath of cold water, the ice long ago melted. I lift it up, just to feel the weight of it sloshing around in the glass. And even though I’m close to the dance floor, I can no longer see them through the haze—Helen and Freddy.

That cloud of smoke and heat is also the reason I don’t see Stan, who barrels toward me and then spins into the chair next to me.

“You owe me,” he says, passing me a bag. “Marcus left this for you.”

He’s leaning in close so that I can hear, yelling so that I can feel the pressure of his breath. It’s funny, I think, that he’s the one passing me the cash. Marcus, too, must have liked the irony of the gesture.

“I’ve told you,” I yell back, “I’ll let you know when I have everything organized. You can pay me then.”

“So he did it?” Stan says, his eyes hungry.

“I’m going to give you what I have,” I say, “but you have to pay first. That was the deal.” Who knows if Stan will find what he needs in the pages I’ve gathered for him, but by the time he figures it out, I’ll be gone.

He nods and pulls out his phone, holds it up to show me. “Just give me what you have and I’ll wire the money.”

I hate it, the idea that I might be giving Stan something he wants. Even if this time I’m being compensated fairly.

“Did you find out why?” he says, his face close to mine.

“You’ll have to see for yourself,” I say. I’ve never made Stan any guarantees.

Then he mutters under his breath, “Those fuckers.”

“I have to go,” I say. I stand up, turn the bottle upside down in the bucket, draining the last of the vodka.

“Do you want me to walk you home?”

I almost laugh. There is nothing I want less.

“I’ll be fine, Stan.”

He nods and points a finger across the room to the exit, a grin spreading across his face. He looks older in here than he does outside, his white hair matted against his temples from the sweat, and I wonder if he could have avoided all this, if maybe I could have, too.

I wedge my way through the crowd, my ears buzzing from the music, and I don’t stop until I’m pushing the front door open.

When I hit the street, I walk past Ferragamo, past the Piazzetta, where late-night partyers wrapped in Pucci and Gucci enjoy drinks. When I get to the funicular, it’s no longer running. There are groups of people gathered along the railing overlooking the Mediterranean, enjoying the view of Vesuvius. A cluster of young men look up at me, and I pull my skirt lower and start walking toward the road. I need a taxi but there are none waiting. The young men whistle, shake their hands.

“You want a ride?” asks a man idling on a motor scooter.

“I’m going to the marina,” I say. I’d always rather take a chance with an individual over a group. And his English is clean, sober.

“Yes,” he says, “me too.”

I get on the back, the heavy bag in my lap, and let the wind whip my hair into my face. At one point I turn around and see a taxi behind us. Then its lights disappear. The man drops me off at a well-lit corner, and his scooter sputters, echoing against the stone walls of the buildings, as he leaves.

I walk down the wide street that fronts the marina. There are no luxury boutiques here, no villas hidden behind rock walls, just apartment buildings, closed cafés, and cats yowling. I walk alone, checking the slips for a boat. It must take minutes before I notice them behind me. I hear their Italian, their laughter. The night is warm, but the sound chills me.

I keep my steps even, but the voices are gaining on me. I try to decide how long I have until they reel me in. It’s awful math but I know it so well. Their laughter high, like coyotes.

It’s so slow, this cat-and-mouse. But then, so many men like it that way.

I can see the outline of the cliffs ahead of me as the apartment buildings begin to thin out. At the end of the street is a low wall, where the road stops. There is nowhere else to go. Something clatters to the ground—it sounds like a beer can, or a gunshot. I can’t tell.

Options run through my mind— scream, run, hide, I’m fast, resourceful —when I hear a voice.

“Lorna?”

I’m not expecting the familiarity of my own name.

“Who’s there?” I stop, look around. But the street is empty except for me, the men.

“I was hoping I might catch you—”

I still don’t know who’s speaking, the voice almost muffled by the sound of the footsteps of the men following me. But before I can ask again, the group of men passes me by. They jump over the wall at the end of the street and onto a trail that cuts through the grass. As if that was always their plan.

It’s only when they’re gone that I realize I’m alone, and that is the real danger.