The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan
Mila ordered another Glenfiddich from Bertrand and a bacon sandwich from The Last Minute’s small kitchen. She put aside her confessions for Sam; the story of herself that she had only told one person before – and she opened up the tracking software on the laptop, which would tell her where Sam was going.
She studied the route. From The Last Minute to a hotel in Greenwich Village to a nightclub to another hotel. She didn’t believe he was nightclubbing. And she didn’t believe whoever he was tracking was out nightclubbing either. He’d found the tracker she’d planted on him and put it in a cab. She smiled. Sam was no fool. And now he knew she’d tricked him. For a moment she considered deleting the confession; she was mad at him, unreasonably, she knew, but mad all the same. She was alive and she felt sure his baby was probably dead or lost forever to him, no matter what promises Anna made. Novem Soles had no honor, no sense of justice, no kindness. They would never give him his child back and she knew it and she wished he could know it as well. She could not make him understand; she could not force him to abandon hope.
She could not do to him what had been done to her.
She took a long sip of the whisky and put her fingertips back to the keyboard, the letters on the electronic screen hanging like small, curved ghosts before her eyes.