Raquel no longer felt safe anywhere. In her hotel room, she couldn’t shower without checking for intruders in the empty cabinets under the sinks. She couldn’t fall asleep without testing the bolt on the door. And she couldn’t remain asleep either. Every few hours, she would wake and tense and have to check for men in the bathroom cabinets again.

Sitting in the shady café garden where she’d told Marcus and Emma to meet her, she felt tired enough to fall asleep at the table. The description of the café online had said that the garden was quiet and secluded, which seemed true enough. Fat-bottomed palm trees framed the perimeter, the pinnate leaves of the taller ones creating a partial roof overhead.

But were a few squatting palms really going to protect them? She was still sitting here alone. Her mother still owed half a million dollars to a psychopath. When her phone rang and she saw that it was Thiago, she was so grateful she began to cry.

Bom dia, fugitive! What’s that noise—you’re not getting weepy, are you?

Of course not. I’m not a crier. She pressed her hand over her nose to stifle the sound.

You are a menacing machine, mulher! he shouted at her from Rio. This place is a shit show without you. When are you coming back?

I don’t know. The loan shark just threatened to kidnap my brother.

You got to love this country, eh? Viva Brazil! Thiago whistled a little samba into the phone. But seriously, woman, you come from Jews—don’t your people always have some money in the mattress for crap like this? You’re going to prevail, Raquel, you always do. Gotta run. That ass pimple Enrico’s calling.

And he was gone.

That was it, all she’d get of him from here.

Before she could wallow or recover, Emma and Marcus came through the door of the café into the back garden. Her brother bent to kiss her first and she didn’t bother to berate him for coming to Salvador without telling her or for going straight to Emma’s bed. He was like their mother. With their green eyes and quiet, reptilian ways, they did things exactly as they pleased. Watching him sit down across from her, she thought of all the things Marcus had not been, and would never be.

Not the offspring of a shadow.

Not terrified to ask their mother about that shadow and equally terrified that he might never have a chance to ask her.

And Marcus, tall, slinky, jewel-eyed Marcus, was not waking every morning alone.

He was not obliged to stare across this table at their mother’s translator, so sated and aglow she might as well have hung a sign around her neck that said I JUST HAD SEX WITH YOUR BROTHER. IT WAS SUBLIME.