Alessandro had been sleeping beside him for hours, but Rocha was too nervous to sleep. He’d called the two illegal “elimination” services that his sister had insisted upon, though not before she’d berated him for putting their family in such a perilous position over some writer with a gambling problem. He didn’t offer an apology and his sister didn’t demand one. They were not that sort of family, though she was right that he had gone too far with this. His misstep had been with the translator in his hotel. When she told him Beatriz’s new manuscript was there in the room, he’d panted for it like a dog. He’d acted with as little forethought as an animal. Now his name, the love of his life, the full extent of his holdings—it was all exposed.

Disgusted, he got up and shuffled into the kitchen. It was almost dawn. Agitated, he flipped again through the unopened mail from the day before and stopped at a slender blue envelope that he hadn’t noted earlier among the bills. The post office stamp said Boipeba, the smallest of the Tinharé islands off the coast of Salvador. It was the slip of island where After the Alley ended—or rather where the novel ended in his version of it. The scene he’d chosen for the final page hadn’t been the last one in the document, but he’d felt confident that it was the correct place to close the story, and that Beatriz would agree. He’d left the woman standing at the edge of the ocean with her child while the man who is not the child’s father lies asleep, oblivious, in the hotel, the sun reflecting so harshly off the sand that the woman tells the little girl to close her eyes.

He’d been uncertain about eliminating the pages after that without Beatriz’s permission. At the thought of it now, he nervously jerked back his thumb and sliced it along the edge of the envelope. That damned woman. Whatever she wanted from him now, he would ignore it.

Unfolding the letter inside, he skipped to the end of the message, to the name Yolanda. They had disagreed about that early story as well. He had thought Beatriz could get away with only so many tales of self-sabotage in one book, and Yolanda was an adolescent character. He found teenagers even more irritating in fiction than they tended to be in reality. Yolanda in her foolish adolescent pursuit of gloom pretended to be deaf. She gave herself over to this false malady so completely that she didn’t hear, or refused to hear, the soldiers approaching her family’s house, or her father calling for her to run and hide in the silo. She just kept cutting things out of her mother’s magazines, the word “shine” and then a sliver of a windowpane, her hand guiding the scissor blades as delicately as if she were cutting a bandage off a wound.

Querido Roberto,

The quiet here is complete.

You were right, this was the place to let things end.

Please tell Raquel I’ll wait for her.

I’m at the hotel with the yellow umbrellas.

Yolanda