By the time Rocha clicked to the right channel he’d missed the last of the flames. All the cameras were showing now was the ash, blowing in gusts like swarms of locusts, or like something more minuscule that couldn’t be captured on TV—clusters of atoms or electrons, the spectral bits of a mind too extraordinary to leave the world in the ordinary way of simply getting old and waiting for disease.

Then, at last, the camera zoomed out and he saw the hotel sign and the yellow umbrellas, how much of the back half of the building had been blackened into a cavity of ashes. A young man from the island who worked at the reception desk was speaking into a microphone, but Rocha put him on mute. He couldn’t stand to hear the analysis of some bellhop in flip-flops. He’d already heard the island people going on about her odd cigars, how the fire had surely been an accident. But Beatriz had told him and he’d missed it. She’d said the island was the right place to end and he’d read the sentence only as it pertained to him and the book of hers he’d published, as her gracious way of letting him know she was not appalled by what he had done with her pages. He’d read the note only for what it said about his skill, his worth to her as an editor.

Even now, watching the brigade of shirtless men from the island splashing buckets of water at the room in which she’d caught on fire, Rocha could not think of her actual body. Only of her sentences, of Luisa Flaks in the bathtub letting the suds and water flow over the edge and on and on, of how Beatriz had insisted that he misunderstood, that language was what had to be restrained, not the woman she’d invented, not the water pushing over the edge, onto the floor.

And now even the ash was unclear. A speck of soot or sand had gotten stuck on the camera lens, or a smear of water.

Goddamn it, fix it! Rocha shouted at the TV like an old man. But the smudge remained.

Eliminated. That was the word the service had used when they called to let him know that the loan shark was finally gone. They had found him. Rocha’s sister had insisted that he hire two services, as one was sure to be incompetent. To pay multiple criminals to find and kill someone on his behalf, to condone a murder, to write a check for one, had made Rocha feel morally loathsome. He’d always thought of himself as more principled than his siblings. He’d indulged himself as they had, but had thought he was different, that when it really mattered he would stick to his principles in a way that his complacent brothers and sisters never would. But it wasn’t true. When Marcus was kidnapped, Alessandro had suggested the possibility of hiring a hit man, but Rocha had chafed at the suggestion. Hire a murderer? Endorse such an industry? He’d told Alessandro that the country would never move forward if law-abiding citizens made a practice of hiring murderers to kill one another.

But he had done it. He’d hired a murderer. Several of them. He was a man who kept to his principles at the expense of other people’s lives but not his own. Not his lover’s. And now there was nothing to do but watch this worthless, sooty footage of a burning building on the TV along with everyone else.