The Morning After

You never finished my game.” My head was on Jameson’s chest. I listened to his heartbeat as I waited for his reply. “I waited, but you never came back, never found the final clue.”

“Do you still have it?” Jameson asked, and I felt the quiet rumble in his voice.

I’d left it there in the narrow staircase passageway from whence he’d disappeared. “Can you at least tell me how you did it?” I asked Jameson.

He was silent for so long, I didn’t think he was going to reply—but then he did. “How else?” I could hear an echo of a crooked little smile in his voice, layered over something else, something he was trying to hide from me. “A secret passageway.”

I thought back to the guesses I’d made about his secret—the secret that had filled him with an indescribable energy, that had put him in the mood to play. “You found something.” I repeated my earlier guess, then his correction. “Multiple somethings.”

Multiple passageways.

“They’re everywhere in this city,” Jameson murmured. “If only you know to look.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose then, only I wasn’t sure at first why. Then I remembered—the woman in the burnt-red scarf, the one who’d told me about the plaques scattered throughout the city.

She’d used the exact same words.

“You won our wager,” Jameson said, and I craned my neck to look at his face without sitting up. “You solved my game before midnight. I never finished yours.”

What did you see at the end of the narrow passage? Why did you take off? What happened once you did? What the hell did you stumble into, Jameson?

“By the terms of our wager, that means I get to decide what we do our last day in Prague,” I said. I pushed myself up off his chest, crossed my legs, and sat there in bed for a moment, just looking at him. “Do you want there to be a last day in Prague?” I asked.

Do we need to get out of here?

Jameson responded like someone who hadn’t a care in the entire world. He stayed exactly where he was in bed, looking at me with a smile I knew all too well. “I hear Belize is nice this time of year,” he said.

That was Jameson, pretending that this didn’t matter. Pretending that he didn’t need to leave.

I got out of bed and sent a brief text to Alisa, then turned back to the boy on the bed. The boy with the bandages at the base of his neck.

Jameson Winchester Hawthorne. “Belize it is,” I said.