She turns all the way so we face each other squarely. “No, it’s not. I was just… I don’t know what I was doing. It was nothing. You have to know that. And I don’t know what you think you saw, but he was not in my room overnight. I did not see him until the next day, he simply checked in on me in the morning.”
“Okay.” She runs her hand up my body, stares at me. “Seriously.”
She smiles a little, turns back to her original position. After a moment, she says, “You were right, by the way. Sean is not married.”
Gardner may be an inconsistent human being, but his data sure is reliable.
Then she adds, “I asked him about it after he stole me away from you in Baltimore, wanted to know why he wore a wedding band. He told me his wife had died years earlier and that he leaves the ring on because ‘there will only ever be one Mrs. Douglas’ and he will never remarry—his words.” She chuckles quietly. “Then he told me it helps to fend off the ladies, too.”
What a pretentious, self-congratulating piece of—
“I liked that about him,” she says.
Oh.
Then, as she yawns, “It was one of his two redeeming qualities.” When I don’t respond, she continues, “The idea of someone knowing when real love has come and gone from this life, how that person can love the memory of someone more than they could ever love again.” She pushes back against me again. “There’s no truer sign of love, nothing more beautiful, than sacrifice.”
She takes a deep breath, holds it the way I used to when inhaling my first hit of nicotine for the day, then lets it slip out as a sigh.
“So,” I say, “what was his other redeeming quality?”
She shifts her body a little. “He seemed to have his finger on the pulse of what was going on even though he appeared aloof, like it was easy for him. Like the way he found me in the parking lot of the Italian restaurant.” She turns a little. “I wasn’t happy about that, as you know—but he always seemed in control, even though he appeared out of it.”
Just what I wanted to hear. To me, he was the distracted bumbler tossing shells in the Chesapeake; Melody’s depiction indicates that my interpretation might’ve been wrong all along.
“He really that different from all the other marshals you’ve known?”
She gently brushes her cheek, thinks. “He was more talkative, but that’s not saying much. Every marshal I’ve known has been incredibly focused, not easily diverted.” I mentally shrug. Then: “I don’t know, maybe it’s because he came from the FBI.”
Now my body stops rising and falling.
“What do you mean?”
“He said he used to be with the FBI, was there for most of his career, moved to the Marshals Service not too long ago.”
My conceptual sketch of Sean, the abstract drawn and colored by my limited observations, turned out to be an impressionistic work. And useless. As I start to hear Melody’s breathing deepen, I know she’s seconds from sleep. Me? Not a frigging wink anywhere in my near future. Her breath stutters like she’s going to say something else, that there’s more to the story, but she either forgot or is too tired to continue. I twist my arm up and over her head, begin lightly stroking her hair, run my fingers back and forth across her hairline at the top of her neck.
Then, barely audible, she asks, “Do you speak Italian?”
I know some, mostly general greetings and small talk, gastronomic terms, and slang no one would ever want translated. “A little.”
Her final words: “Whisper to me.”
I am preoccupied with Sean now, racked with concern that he’s been one room away this entire time, so in control of the operation that he’s grabbing a cup of coffee and a croissant before dropping by. But Melody’s effect on my being, her steady and strong pull on my life like I have my own personal gravity, has me succumbing to her command. I wrap my arm around her body, outside of her clothes, outside of the sheet, and pull her in, move my head to hers, and whisper all the things I would want her to know, that I could never say for fear she would not have the will to leave me. I whisper in broken Italian how she is both a princess and an angel; how I love what she’s done for me, how when I’m