The Billionaire Reunion

The sea was the same as always. Mara knew it before the dream had finished building itself around her: the salt on the wind, the tilt of the cobblestones under her bare feet, the low gold light that hung over a town with no name and no clocks. Whitewashed houses leaned toward one another like old friends trading secrets. Somewhere above the harbor, a bell rang once, soft as a held breath. "You're late," said a voice beside her. She didn't need to turn. He always fell into step with her this way, without arriving, as though he had been walking there for hours and had simply been waiting for her to catch up. He was tall, with dark hair going grey at the temples and hands tucked into the pockets of a charcoal coat that was never too warm for the weather. His eyes were on the water. They were always on the water, until they were on her. "I'm not late," Mara said. "I have nowhere to be." "Then you're early." The corner of his mouth moved. It was not quite a smile; it was the place where one would eventually go. "Walk with me." So she did. They followed the street down past shuttered shops and baskets of lemons that smelled sharper than lemons ever did in waking life. Their shoulders almost touched. They never quite did, not yet, and the almost had become its own kind of conversation. "Did you eat today?" he asked. Mara laughed, because it was such a strange thing to be asked by a man she had never met. "That's your question? Three months of this, and you want to know about my lunch?" "It's a fair question. You were skipping meals last week." "How could you possibly know that?" He didn't answer. He only looked at her, and in his face she saw something she had trained herself not to look for in other people's faces: worry, plain and unguarded, offered without any invoice attached. Nobody worried about Mara Quinn. She was the one who worried, who counted, who planned for the rent and the late fee and the bad month. She had been the responsible one since she was nine years old. "You work too hard," he said quietly. "Somebody has to." "Not tonight." They reached the end of the pier, where the planks gave way to open water as still as glass. The sun was sinking, or perhaps rising; in this town she could never tell which. She felt his presence at her side, warm and steady as a lit window, and for one dangerous moment she let herself lean into it. Then the bell rang again, and the light began to thin. "Morning's coming," he said, and for the first time he sounded sorry. "Who are you?" She had asked it before. She asked it every night, and every night the dream swallowed the answer. "Come back tomorrow," he said, "and I'll try again." The sea went white. The pier dissolved. Mara reached for his hand and closed her fingers around nothing at all. * * * She woke at 6:12 a.m. to the sound of a kettle and the ache of an empty hand. For a moment she lay still, staring at the water stain on her ceiling, the one shaped vaguely like Portugal. The dream clung to her the way cold clings to skin after a swim. The smell of lemons. The weight of a stranger's attention. Then the radiator knocked, a neighbor's alarm began to scream through the wall, and the real world rolled over her like a tide. Rent was due in nine days. The Lisbon shipping contract was due in four. She had slept, by her own tired arithmetic, about five hours, and none of them had felt like rest. "Same guy?" Dani asked, when Mara shuffled into the kitchen. Dani Okafor stood at the counter in a stolen university hoodie, pouring boiling water over two mismatched mugs with the grim focus of a surgeon. She had been Mara's roommate for six years and her best friend for longer, and she had never once pretended to find Mara's dreams mysterious. "Same guy," Mara admitted. "Three months, Mara. At this point he's your boyfriend. He should be paying half the electricity." "He isn't real." "Neither is the heating in this building, and yet we've both put our faith in it." Dani slid a mug across the counter. "Did he say anything useful this time? A name? A phone number? Where he keeps his money?" "He asked if I'd eaten." Dani's face softened. "Okay. That one I like." Mara wrapped both hands around the mug and said nothing. That was the trouble. She liked it too. She liked it far more than a practical woman with a fraying budget and a dictionary-stuffed bookshelf had any right to like a man made of sleep. She had learned languages the hard way, as a child translating for her mother in clinic waiting rooms and landlords' offices, standing on tiptoe to speak words she barely understood on behalf of a woman who cleaned other people's buildings for a living. Mara had grown up believing that the world ran on whoever understood it first. She did not trust anything she couldn't read, parse, or put in a contract. A recurring dream about a stranger fit none of those categories, and so she kept it in a drawer in her mind and refused to open it. Her laptop chimed from the table. It was an email, sent at 5:58 a.m., from an address she didn't recognize. Mara read it once, then again, then turned the screen toward Dani without a word. Ms. Quinn: Varga Industries requires a confidential interpreter and document translator for a two-week engagement beginning Monday. Your fee will be forty thousand dollars, payable in advance. Please confirm by noon. C. Hale, Office of the Chief Executive Dani read it, then looked up with an expression of wild, delighted horror. "Forty thousand dollars." "It's a scam." "It's Varga Industries. The sleep-tech people. Their ads are on every bus shelter in the city." Dani was already scrolling on her phone. "Billionaire founder, reclusive, apparently cursed with good bone structure and no social media. There's barely a photo of him. Look, it's just the back of a coat." Mara looked. A grainy shot from a charity gala: a tall figure turned away from the camera, a dark head bent toward a conversation. It told her nothing. And yet something in her chest tightened, briefly, like a held breath. "Why me?" she said. "I do shipping contracts. I do cookbooks." "Who cares? Take it." Dani set down her phone. "You've been drowning since March. If you won't let a mysterious benefactor throw you a rope, I will personally throw you off the roof." "And if there's a catch?" "There's always a catch," Dani said. "That's what the forty thousand is for." Mara thought of the rent notice taped inside the cupboard door, the one she'd been pretending was a recipe card. She thought of her mother's last birthday, and the small bright lie she'd told about her work. She typed I accept before she could change her mind. * * * Varga Tower rose out of the financial district like a blade drawn from a sheath of glass. On Monday morning Mara stood in its lobby in her one good blazer, feeling the marble swallow the sound of her footsteps, and wondered when exactly she had agreed to walk into a story she didn't understand. "Ms. Quinn." A man in a charcoal suit materialized at her elbow. He was fortyish, silver-haired, with the careful face of someone who had spent decades keeping other people's secrets. "Corwin Hale. We spoke by email." "You sent it at six in the morning." "Mr. Varga prefers things settled early." He gestured to a private elevator. "He's been expecting you." Expecting. Not looking forward to meeting. It was an odd choice of word, and Mara filed it away with the other small oddities piling up like loose change: the fee, the speed, the way Corwin's eyes had lingered on her face a moment too long, as if checking it against a photograph. The elevator rose in silence. Forty floors, fifty, sixty. The city shrank to a map beneath her. Her pulse had begun a strange, heavy rhythm, and she told herself it was the altitude, and she knew it wasn't. The doors parted onto a hall of pale stone and quiet light. At the far end stood a pair of glass doors, and beyond them a boardroom made entirely of sky. Someone was standing at the window with his back to her. Tall. Dark hair, silvering at the temples. Hands in the pockets of a charcoal coat. Mara stopped walking. No, she thought, with perfect, ringing clarity. No. Absolutely not. Corwin had gone silent beside her. The man at the window must have heard the doors, because he turned, slowly, the way a person turns when he already knows what he'll find. Brown eyes. The mouth that was never quite a smile. Lemons. Salt. A bell, soft as a held breath. The blood drained from his face as visibly as it drained from hers. For a long moment neither of them moved, and the whole glittering city seemed to hold still beneath the glass. Then Elias Varga straightened, the color still gone from his cheeks, and said in a voice far too steady to be honest: "Ms. Quinn. Welcome. I don't believe we've ever met."