The Room by the Window

Cole lied to me in March.

He is a terrible liar, which is exactly why it worked. I assumed nobody that bad at lying would attempt fraud.

"Site survey," he said. "Resort client. Four days. Bring the swimsuit you claim you don't own."

He had a binder. The binder had tabs. Nobody suspects a man with tabs.

On the plane he reviewed elevation drawings that, I worked out much later, belonged to a project his company had closed out two years ago. I slept on his shoulder and drooled slightly on a load-bearing schematic, and he did not wake me.

That should have been my first clue. Cole protects documents.

At the front desk, the woman smiled and said our room was ready. Cole said, "The one by the window."

I thought nothing of it. Every hotel room has a window. I was tired, and the air outside smelled like flowers that had never had to try.

The second clue came at breakfast.

The restaurant had a wall. The wall had jam.

Not jars on a shelf. A whole wall of it, forty kinds, lined up in little glass cells like a museum of sweetness. There were tongs.

I stopped walking.

Cole kept his eyes on the buffet like a man conducting a site survey. "They're known for it," he said. "Apparently."

Apparently.

I stood in front of forty jams and did the math I had been refusing to do since the airport. A room by the window. A wall of jam at breakfast. A beach, he had mentioned last night, where the water stays shallow for a long way out.

I had said those words once. All of them. In order.

Not to him. Past him. Three in the morning, eight days after my father's funeral, lying in the dark with my back against his chest, so sure he was asleep that I finally let the whole stupid promise out of my mouth. Maui. The shallow water. The jam. The room by the window. The little suitcase I packed at nine and unpacked at ten and never packed again.

He had not moved. He had not said a word. I had counted his breaths to make sure.