When Milo woke, cotton mouthed and weak, he was surrounded by women. Tina and Stephanie and, behind them, Alexandra and Leticia Jones—who, it turned out, hadn’t been a fever dream. He should have been surprised, but this somehow felt right, that all of them would be there. His head hurt, but the pain had been pushed some distance away by whatever drugs he’d been filled with.
“Hey,” he said, and smiled.
“Dummy,” said Tina.
Stephanie shot her a look. “Mom.”
“He promised he’d stay out of trouble. Milo, you promised.”
Alexandra pressed forward. “How are you?”
“I hurt.”
“Good,” Tina said, then leaned close and kissed his forehead.
“Leticia,” Milo said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t be nice to me,” Leticia said. “If it wasn’t for you, I could have gotten her. Now I’m stuck here, watching over you and your family.”
“You don’t need to,” Alexandra said over her shoulder. “We have people.”
“Then why weren’t they waiting at the airport for him?”
Gradually, that mellow feeling of being surrounded by women faded. He was having trouble keeping track of the back-and-forth, and when the doctor came and told them to keep it down it felt like protection. Only Stephanie remained above the fray, gripping his hand and looking silently at some point over his head, her mind moving through whatever emotions were taking hold of her. He squeezed her fingers and gave her a smile that she returned, but sadly.
The doctor explained what everyone else already knew—he’d been poisoned with aconite.
“Wolfsbane,” Stephanie blurted. “It’s what they used to kill Emperor Claudius.”
“We were lucky to discover it,” said the doctor.
Once the doctor had checked his vitals and proclaimed that he would live, Alexandra followed her out to take calls, and Leticia went to the chair to watch over him from a distance.
“You going to tell me?” Tina asked him.
“A woman poisoned me.”
“She told me that,” Tina said, nodding at Leticia. “That’s why she won’t leave the room. But I want to know why. I want to know who she is.”
“Little Miss?” Milo said. “Can you give us a minute?”
“No,” said Stephanie, squeezing his hand tighter. “I’m seventeen, Dad. I’m not a little anything.”
Milo looked to Tina, who arched a brow as if to say, Don’t ask. “Okay, then,” he said after a moment. “She works for my old office.”
“Tourism?” Tina asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought that was history.”
“Apparently not.”
Stephanie shifted, eyes on him, but she didn’t look confused. Just curious.
“Why you?” Tina asked.
“I don’t know.” Milo raised his head an inch to see Leticia looking at her phone. “How did you end up there?”
Not looking up from her screen, Leticia said, “I wasn’t there for you. I was there for her. Then you went and collapsed, and I lost her. Thank you very much.”
“Sorry.”
Leticia shrugged.
To Tina, he said, “She saved my life.”
Stephanie looked over her shoulder at Leticia, her expression softening slightly. She was impressed by Leticia Jones, as well she should be.
“So what do we do now?” Tina asked.
The enormity of what had happened was only now dawning on Milo, though Leticia had seen it immediately. The Department of Tourism had decided to target him, and if the department was half as ruthless as it had once been, then that meant that the full force of the American machine was bearing down on him and would not let his wife and child stand in its way.
“We hide,” Milo said, and in Tina’s face he saw what those two little words meant. Flashbacks to worse times, to paranoia, fear for her child’s safety, and a time when she didn’t completely trust her husband.
Leticia was already standing up, pocketing her phone. “No. We go after them. You’ve got the staff.”
“We’re ignorant,” Milo said, trying to sit up. “All we would do is make things worse.”
She didn’t like that answer, he could tell. Unused energy, a by-product of fury, coursed through Leticia. She wanted an object to point all that energy at. Instead, she pointed at Milo. “You better not get me killed, old man.”
It was a long night. Alexandra called for two nearby librarians—Dalmatian and Samoyed—to take Tina back to the house to choose what couldn’t be left behind, while Stephanie and Leticia remained in the hospital with him. His daughter had questions, and Milo tried to stay awake in order to answer them. It was a strange feeling, opening up to her for the first time about things that she’d never shown an interest in, even though, more than once, they had altered the course of her life. Stephanie listened quietly to it all—Tourism, his secret UN department, working off the grid, gathering intelligence, the Library. “It sort of makes things make sense,” she said.
“What things?”
“You know. Like the guy who shot you.”
She’d been six when a distraught man had arrived at their Park Slope apartment and, in a rush of anger and tears, shot Milo point-blank. “I’m still so sorry you had to see that.”
“I see everything,” she said.
“You do.”
Unexpectedly, she grinned. “Does that mean I should become a spy?”
“Never.”
They discussed the practicalities of going underground. Losing weeks, or more, of school wasn’t a tragedy—Frau Pappan could be talked into some compromise—but Stephanie was more worried about losing her friends, even Halifa. What would they think of her sudden disappearance?
“Why don’t you call them?” Milo asked.
“I can do that?”
“Just don’t tell them what’s really going on. Let’s come up with something better.”
If she didn’t already know, Milo taught her how to lie.
By midnight Tina had returned to the hospital, the back of their Mercedes station wagon so full that the rearview no longer showed the road behind it, and Leticia joined them on the four-hour drive south to Milan, where they maintained an acceptable safe house in Brera. The whole way, Milo remained hunched in the backseat with Stephanie, fighting nausea and trying to keep his eyes open. He was surprised that his daughter had so few concerns. After the initial shock, she seemed to have been energized by this onrush of danger and sudden movement. As if she’d been waiting for something to break through the crust of her boring life. Or maybe Milo was reading her that way because that was how he wanted to see her. Excited, and not terrified.