THE DEVIL I LOVE

Chapter Four — Cold Water

Aria did not sleep well.

She lay in the dark with the conversation replaying on the backs of her eyelids and the weight of a last name pressing on her chest. By morning she had made a decision: she would not reply if he texted again. She would let the conversation dissolve naturally, the way these things did when neither party pushed forward. It was the sensible choice. The safe choice.

Good morning, his message read at seven forty-three. Did you sleep?

Aria stared at it while her coffee brewed.

No, she wrote back.

She blamed the coffee for her lack of discipline.

Neither did I, he replied.

She put her phone face-down on the counter and poured her coffee and drank half of it standing at the kitchen window, watching the city below her apartment move through its morning rhythms. Delivery trucks. Early joggers. A woman walking a very small dog with tremendous dignity.

Normal things. Grounded things.

She picked up the phone.

We shouldn't be talking, she typed.

Probably not, he agreed immediately.

You know why.

I do.

Then why did you text me?

The three dots pulsed for longer this time. She watched them with the kind of attention she hadn't given anything in recent memory.

Because I haven't stopped thinking about you since Saturday, he wrote. And I'm not particularly interested in pretending otherwise.

Aria exhaled slowly.

She had built careful walls over twenty-four years. Not cold walls — she wasn't a cold person. But careful ones, the kind constructed from good sense and family loyalty and a quiet understanding that some things were not available to her simply because of the name she carried.

Damien Voss was one of those things.

This is a bad idea, she typed.

Almost certainly, he replied.

I'm serious.

So am I. It's a terrible idea. A pause. Then: Have dinner with me anyway.

Aria set the phone down again. Picked it up again.

She thought about her father's face at the breakfast table Sunday morning. She thought about the iron gates and the signing dinner and the word focused delivered like a quiet commandment.

She thought about a ballroom and eleven minutes and a man who had spoken to her like she was simply a person.

One dinner, she typed. Somewhere no one will see us.

I know a place, he replied. Friday. I'll send the details.

Aria finished her coffee.

She was already in trouble and she knew it. The particular kind of trouble that didn't announce itself loudly but settled in quietly, rearranging things, making itself at home before you'd thought to check whether you'd left the door open.

She had left the door open.

She wasn't sure, standing in her kitchen in the early morning light, that she was sorry.