A rubbery feeling filled Emma’s head as she reentered the Aram Yamí. At the reception desk, she had trouble recalling Rocha’s first name and then stuttered as she said her own. Beside her, Raquel was weeping and making frantic calls on her cell. In the elevator, Raquel’s phone stopped getting reception, and she clutched Emma’s arm like a blind person.

They could be hacking off my brother’s ear right now, Raquel said. He could be bleeding to death as we’re standing here in this elevator. Maybe they’ll leave him in the trunk of a car until he suffocates from the heat.

That’s not going to happen, Emma assured her, as if they were speaking about a book she’d been teaching for years. As if there weren’t anyone as reliable in a kidnapping as a devoted translator.

The elevator dinged.

Its single wooden panel slid open.

In the blue, carpeted quiet leading to Rocha’s room, Emma thought of her own hotel room, of Marcus’s clothes waiting for her, draped over the chair and on the desk, of his toothbrush beside the sink, his mother’s novel still face down on the page where they had stopped reading it this morning. Of Miles arriving, impossibly, in five and a half hours.

Emma, keep going. It’s not that door.

I just need a second.

But Rocha had heard them and stepped out into the hall. It’s fine, take a second, he said. Nothing wrong with a little hesitation before hitting up a man for his fortune.