“Pretend you’re my wife in front of everyone,” the millionaire ordered the young woman.

The words hung between them like a crystal glass about to shatter. Beatriz Guevara was still gripping a stack of fresh towels when she noticed how steady his gaze was. The man in the navy suit—Fernando Navarro—stood with the kind of posture born either from fencing lessons or a lifetime of being obeyed. His voice, though, hadn’t been commanding. If anything, it trembled around the edges.

“I know, I know…” he said, hands up, as if he’d just realized how absurd he sounded. “It’s insane. I would never ask if it weren’t urgent.”

Beatriz glanced at the closed door of the small sitting room, a hideaway for VIP guests. The hum of the 15th-floor hallway was muffled, the world narrowed to polished wood, a vase of white lilies, and the scent of lemon polish. She was painfully aware of her uniform—the stiff collar, the sensible shoes, the name tag that declared her Beatriz with tidy black letters. She’d come to Mexico City with dreams that fit into the lining of her single suitcase: a business degree, a career she could be proud of, a life she didn’t have to apologize for. None of those dreams included pretending to be anyone’s wife.

“What do you mean, pretend?” she asked, voice tight. “I don’t even know you.”

He nodded, swallowing. “I’m aware of how it sounds. But—tonight, at Pujol—my family is holding a dinner for my mother’s birthday. It’s not just a birthday, though, it’s a pretext. My uncle and cousin are trying to corner me into an arrangement that would give them control of our company. They’ve been pushing the narrative that I’m unfocused, irresponsible, unable to settle down. That I’m a liability.”

Beatriz’s laugh came out short and incredulous. “And your solution is to hire a stranger to play your wife?”

“Not hire,” he said quickly. “Ask. And pay fairly.” A flush rose at his collar. “I’m not trying to buy a person. I just… need help. If the family believes I’m already married, at least for tonight, it removes the pressure to announce an engagement to someone of their choosing. It buys me time.”

He lowered his briefcase to the coffee table. The clasps popped open with a soft click. Inside lay a paper folder, a sleek phone, and—unexpectedly—an old photograph with a worn edge. He didn’t take the photo out. He stared at it for a beat, as if shy about its presence, then closed the case. When he spoke again, his voice had gentled.

“I’ve noticed you before,” he said. “You hum when you push your cart. You always check if the door chain is on before you knock. You call the elderly guests ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’ even when they are rude. You handled a broken glass in the penthouse last week like a surgeon. You’re careful. And brave.” His mouth twitched. “I told you this would sound strange.”

Beatriz felt heat rise in her cheeks. She hadn’t realized anyone saw her, really saw her, in this building of mirrors.

“How much?” she asked, surprising herself. The question shot out like a dart. “Not for… I mean—for the performance. The time.”

His relief was palpable. “Fifty thousand pesos for the night. I’ll have a car bring you to a stylist this afternoon, then to Pujol at eight. You will dine, meet my family, exchange a few details we’ll agree on, smile at a camera or two, and at the end of the evening, I’ll have you driven home.” He hesitated. “If it becomes complicated, I’ll double it.”

Beatriz had to look away. Fifty thousand pesos was three months of rent and a quarter’s worth of tuition at the public university if she could transfer and get part-time classes. She pictured the ledger she kept at her kitchen table, the columns filled with neat numbers and tiny notes. She also pictured her mother’s hands shelling peas, the sound of the Puebla afternoon through their old window. The part of her that had learned to survive in a city that didn’t care if she sank or swam spoke up first.

“What would I have to say? Who would I be?”

“The basics,” he said, as if discussing a marketing plan. “Your name—your real name, unless you prefer otherwise. That we met at a cultural event in Coyoacán in November. That we were married quietly in February at the civil registry—my mother doesn’t approve of big weddings in times like these. You’re studying business administration—also true—and you grew up in Puebla. My family will insist on details. We’ll rehearse.”

Beatriz drew a breath and silently counted to three. She thought of rules: never lend more than you can afford to lose; never promise what you can’t deliver; never accept an offer that feels like free money. Yet if anything about this felt free, it was her agency. She could say no, walk back out to her cart, and finish laying towels in one room after another until her shift ended. She could say yes and step into a different hallway entirely.

“Why me?” she asked. “If your family is so powerful, you can hire an actress.”

“Because they would smell theater,” he said simply. “They are hunters. They would circle until the script tears. You don’t seem like a woman who tears.”

He had a way of delivering compliments that didn’t feel like sugar, just fact. Beatriz bit the inside of her cheek. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll do it. But I have boundaries. No kissing. No… impropriety.”

“Of course.” He looked almost offended, but then he softened. “I’m asking you to lie for me, not to abandon yourself.”

---

The stylist’s studio in Polanco smelled faintly of jasmine and hot irons. The woman who introduced herself as Ximena didn’t blink when Fernando explained, “My wife needs something elegant for tonight.” She appraised Beatriz with a professional’s narrowed eyes, then smiled as if pleased by a personal project.

“We’ll keep her essence,” Ximena said, separating Beatriz’s long dark hair into sections. “Sleek bun, a dress that speaks money without shouting, and makeup that lets her eyes do the work.”

Beatriz sat while people worked around her, faces appearing in mirrors like commas. She watched herself transform into a woman who could step into a restaurant like Pujol and not feel like an impostor. The dress Ximena chose was a deep green, the color of polished malachite, with a neckline that traced her collarbones and sleeves that kissed her wrists. It wasn’t expensive because of sequins or a label; it was expensive because it trusted shape and cut. When they slid the dress over her head, Beatriz looked at the mirror and saw—not someone else—but an uncrumpled version of herself.

Fernando waited in the reception area, on his phone, jaw set. He stood when he saw her and for a second forgot whatever news his screen had delivered.

“You look…” He didn’t finish the sentence, which made it better. “Shall we go over the plan?”

They sat in the back of his car as the driver navigated the evening traffic. Mexico City glowed outside, the sky a bruised violet, headlights like beads on a string. Fernando handed Beatriz a card with bullet points.

“Names,” he began. “My mother is Teresa. My uncle—her brother—is Julio. He built our construction firm with my grandfather, and then he built his son Ignacio into a perfect blade. Ignacio is my cousin—he’s thirty-six, Harvard Business School, believes in synergies like some people believe in saints. There’s also my sister, Alma, who will pretend she doesn’t know how to smile, and my grandmother, Luisa, who knows everything. Don’t underestimate Luisa.”

“Noted,” Beatriz said. “When did we meet again?”

“November,” he said. “At a friend’s art opening. We argued about a sculpture made of stacked televisions.”

“What did I say?”

“That art isn’t for kings but for kitchens.” He smiled at the memory he’d invented. “I laughed and you looked offended, so I bought you a coffee to apologize.”

Beatriz let the story settle around them, rehearsing a lie that felt strangely honest in its smallness. “And why did we marry quietly?”

“Because I’ve already had one engagement implode in public,” he said evenly. “We decided to protect this.”

She glanced at him. He had the kind of face that had been taught not to give away too much. She wondered what his eyes looked like when no one was watching.

“And if they ask about children?”

“We’ll say we’re not trying yet,” he said. “Or,” he corrected himself, “we’ll say we don’t discuss that with family during dinner. You can blame me for that boundary.”

Beatriz tucked the card into her clutch. Fear had a way of chewing at the edges of her thoughts; she fed it precise lines and hoped it would be satisfied.

“Why do they need you to be engaged?” she asked, softer. “My being your wife—how does that stop them?”

Fernando watched the city slide by: a taquería with plastic stools, a bookstore with its lights still on, the shadowed arch of a park entrance. “Our company is negotiating a merger with a Spanish firm,” he said. “If I’m ‘unstable,’ if I can be cornered into marrying a partner of their choosing, my voting share becomes leverage. I have to demonstrate that I make my own decisions.”

“And my presence tonight proves that?”

“It complicates their script,” he said. “And in our family, complication buys time.”

---

Pujol was a temple of control. The plates arrived like whispers, the flavors arranged in choreography. Beatriz had never set foot in such a place. The hostess greeted Fernando by name and led them through to a private dining room where a table glittered with glassware. Conversations halted and heads turned.

“Son,” a woman in a slate silk blouse said, rising. She was tall, hair swept into a perfect knot, her earrings discrete and expensive. Teresa. “And this must be…”

“My wife,” Fernando said, steady. “Beatriz.”

It slid into the room like a pebble into a pond. The ripples were faces rearranging, eyes narrowing or widening, mouths holding back judgments too early to reveal. A small, ancient woman at the far end of the table—Luisa, surely—peered at Beatriz as if she were a painting that needed to be viewed from different angles.

Ignacio stood slowly, his smile a straight line. He was handsome in a catalogue way: everything proportioned, everything ironed. “Congratulations,” he said, but it sounded like a question.

“Gracias,” Beatriz said. “We wanted to tell you all in person.” Her voice didn’t shake. She tucked Teresa’s hand between both of hers when the older woman leaned in for air kisses, and she took Alma’s cool kiss with a warmth that made Alma blink. Julio, the uncle, offered a stiff nod, the kind that keeps options open.

The seating had been arranged, of course. Beatriz found herself to Fernando’s right, with Teresa across and Luisa at the head. Ignacio placed himself at Teresa’s flank like an adviser. The first course arrived, and with it the questions.

“How did you meet?” Teresa asked, looping a cloth napkin precisely across her lap.

“At an art opening,” Beatriz said, and described a sculpture of televisions that didn’t exist. “We argued. He apologized with coffee.” She let laughter—a real, small thing—touch her voice. “He was relentless.”

“Annoying,” Alma corrected, sipping her mezcal.

“Romantic,” Teresa murmured, her eyes flicking between them.

Ignacio dabbed the corner of his mouth. “And the wedding? We weren’t aware.”

“Civil registry,” Fernando said. “February.”

“How discreet,” Julio said, making the word sound like a flaw.

“We wanted something that felt ours,” Beatriz offered. She leaned her shoulder lightly against Fernando’s for a heartbeat, a small contact that sent a message the way a whisper can. “We are not very… theatrical people.”

“That must be new,” Ignacio said mildly. “Since the last engagement.”

Beatriz felt the air shift. Fernando’s jaw tightened an imperceptible degree. Beatriz reached for her water glass, giving herself a second. The past she didn’t know could sink them if she didn’t learn to sail it. She turned to Luisa, bypassing the trap.

“Señora Luisa,” she said. “Your grandson tells me you taught him to play lotería with bottle caps and beans. I was always bad at it. I never knew when to take risks.”

Luisa’s eyes sparked with mirth, like coals suddenly fanned. “Then you’re learning,” she said, voice papery and sharp. “You’re here, aren’t you?” She pointed a thin finger at Fernando. “Does she beat you yet?”

“Constantly,” Fernando said, and the table laughed—relief, true humor, Beatriz couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. The room loosened, the tight threads slackening. Even Ignacio’s mouth relaxed into something almost human.

The courses passed like chapters. Mole that tasted like history, a tortilla that was more memory than bread, a dessert that made Beatriz close her eyes. She answered questions about Puebla, about work (“I’m a chambermaid,” she said plainly, and watched the flickers cross certain faces), about her plans to study at night. She didn’t bluff here; the truth sometimes sounded like audacity in these rooms. Teresa surprised her by leaning forward, interested.

“At UNAM?” Teresa asked.

“If I can get in,” Beatriz said.

“You will,” Teresa said, as if it had been decided.

Ignacio tapped his fork against his plate to draw attention as dessert plates were cleared. He had saved something. Beatriz recognized the rhythm of a trapdoor being released.

“Family,” he said, raising his glass, “to Mother’s health. And, of course, to Fernando’s… news.” He smiled without showing teeth. “Since this is a night for truth, perhaps our newlyweds will answer a few more questions.” He turned the smile on Beatriz. “What is Fernando’s middle name?”

The table turned to her as one. Beatriz didn’t blink. “Alejandro,” she said, because it fit the rhythm of his name, because a man like him would have a saint’s name tucked in there.

Ignacio’s eyebrows rose, impressed despite himself. “And his first dog?”

“Canelo,” Beatriz said, rolling the syllables like a cinnamon bun in her mouth. “He named him for the color, not the boxer.” She looked at Luisa. “It was your dog originally, wasn’t it, Señora? He stole the dog and you let him think he won.”

Luisa grinned, delighted. “This one listens,” she told the table. “She has been listening all night.”

Ignacio did not relish being defanged. He leaned back, recalculating. “One more,” he said smoothly, “since you’re so attentive. What is the date of your… civil marriage?”

Beatriz’s spine cooled. The detail they had not nailed down. She could feel Fernando beside her, the tension of a bowstring. The waiter set down tiny cups of coffee like punctuation marks that might end a sentence badly.

Beatriz took her cup, inhaled the scent, and smiled. “The day after my mother’s birthday,” she said. “Because I was superstitious. February seventeenth.”

“Ah,” Ignacio said lightly. “So I suppose you have the certificate.”

“Of course,” Beatriz said, and let the sentence sit like a stone where a river should be. “We keep it somewhere very safe.”

Beside her, Fernando let out the smallest breath. Luisa’s eyes danced. “Bring it to Sunday lunch,” the grandmother said, eyes flicking to Ignacio with satisfaction, as though she enjoyed tripping him with nothing more than an old woman’s curiosity. “I like papers.”

“Of course,” Fernando said, and the room’s temperature rose three degrees, normal conversation resuming around the edges. Ignacio sat back, thwarted for the moment.

It couldn’t last.

Across the room, Beatriz caught a movement—a man in a grey suit in the corridor, conferring with the hostess. He looked once, twice, into their private room with a focus that didn’t belong to a restaurant. Then the hostess came toward them with an apology shaped like a smile.

“Señor Navarro,” she said quietly to Fernando. “There is a gentleman outside who says he must speak with you regarding the—ah—press.”

“Press?” Teresa’s voice sharpened at the word.

Fernando’s face closed like a shutter. “Excuse me,” he said, standing. Beatriz stood too, instinct tightening her into alertness.

Ignacio’s smile returned like a blade catching light. “Stay, cousin,” he murmured. “Your wife can accompany you, of course. Wives do.”

Beatriz followed Fernando into the corridor. The man in grey did not look like a journalist. He looked like a courier of misfortune. He held a tablet out for Fernando to see, screen glowing with a gossip page not known for kindness. There it was: a photo of Fernando with a pretty woman on his arm, dated from last year, headline slashed across the top—BACHELOR NAVARRO BACK WITH EX-FIANCÉE? WEDDING RUMORS SWIRL. The article was old but republished tonight with a new kicker: EXCLUSIVE: SURPRISE WEDDING? SOURCES SAY NAVARRO MARRIES HOTEL EMPLOYEE IN SECRET CEREMONY.

Beatriz’s lungs emptied. The source line made her stomach drop. Someone from the hotel? She pictured the laundry room gossip and the way rumors were currency. A chambermaid who catches a billionaire? That story told itself even when it was a lie.

“This is nothing,” Fernando said tightly. “They don’t have anything of substance.”

“But it’s timed,” Beatriz said, and the clarity of it startled even her. “It’s meant to humiliate you here, tonight.”

“It’s meant to humiliate you,” he corrected, eyes pained. “I’m sorry.” He reached into his jacket and handed her his phone. “If anyone from your building calls, don’t answer. My lawyer can—”

“Fernando,” she said, low. “You must go back in and show them you are not shaken. If you let Ignacio be the one to tell your mother, he will turn your silence into guilt.”

He stared at her for a beat, then nodded. “Walk back with me?”

She did. When they reentered the dining room, the gossip had already reached the table; phones were face-down where they hadn’t been before. Teresa’s expression was all cool composure; Alma looked like a knife you could cut paper with; Julio’s jaw was stone. Only Luisa looked amused by the world’s perpetual talent for drama.

Fernando didn’t sit. He placed his palms lightly on the back of his chair, as if it were a lectern. “There’s a story online,” he said. “It’s false in its implications and insulting in its timing. If anyone here has fed it, I ask that we keep tonight about Mother. If not, then we can enjoy dessert without letting other people’s business models dictate our mood.”

Ignacio’s fingers played with his water glass. “It says she’s a hotel employee,” he said pleasantly. “Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Beatriz said. Silence pressed hard. “I work. It doesn’t hurt my hands.”

Teresa’s mouth twitched—the beginnings of a smile she almost hid and then let be seen. Alma’s knife softened by a degree. Julio’s jaw flexed.

Luisa cackled. “It’s been a while since we had someone interesting at dinner,” she told Teresa. “I like her.”

“Luisa,” Teresa murmured, but her eyes warmed as they settled on Beatriz.

Ignacio weighed the room and saw that the wind was not at his back. He smiled, a diplomat recognizing a skirmish lost. “To Mother,” he said again, lifting his glass. “To health.”

They drank. The moment broke. A marigold petal drifted from a centerpiece onto the table linen like punctuation.

---

On the drive back to Roma Norte, Beatriz sat with her hands folded in her lap. The night felt like a book that had been hurled across a room and somehow landed spine-up, unbroken. Her phone vibrated with messages—Ana from housekeeping, a neighbor, an unknown number. She didn’t look.

“You were extraordinary,” Fernando said. The relief in him had shifted into a kind of awe. “I don’t know how you handled Ignacio.”

“I listened,” she said. “Your grandmother was right.”

He laughed, a sound that cracked something sealed. The city outside had moved into its later mood: lights softer, music leaking from bars in Condesa, a man selling roses at a traffic light. When the car stopped at her building, Beatriz turned to him before she unlatched the door.

“You still have to show a certificate,” she said.

“I know,” he said grimly. “I can think of three ways to maneuver around Luisa’s request, and none of them are elegant.”

“Or,” Beatriz said, surprising herself again, “you could tell them the truth. Not about tonight. About the last engagement. About why you’re scared.”

He stilled. “You think I am?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “I think you don’t want other people making your life smaller. Not your uncle, not the press, not even your fear.”

He watched her with eyes that felt closer than anything he’d done physically. “I asked you to lie and now you’re advising me to tell the truth.”

“I’m advising you to decide for yourself,” she said. “That was the point, wasn’t it?”

He nodded, very slowly. “May I… will you let me transfer the payment now?” he asked, as if returning to a script whose ending had changed.

She shook her head, then smiled at his alarm. “I’m not refusing the money,” she said. “I’m refusing the idea that tonight was just a transaction. It was work. And you will pay me for my work tomorrow morning. In daylight.”

He exhaled, something like gratitude flooding the car. “Daylight,” he echoed. “Then—may I see you tomorrow afternoon, after your shift? We can sign a receipt and a nondisclosure before Ignacio drafts one for you.”

“You think I can’t read legal language?” she teased.

“I think you’ll send my lawyer back to school,” he said. It was said lightly, but respect threaded it.

Beatriz stepped out into the night air, which smelled faintly of damp stone and fried dough from the corner stand. She turned back, hand on the door. “Don’t hide from your grandmother,” she said. “Bring her the only paper worth anything—your own word.”

He smiled, not the practiced public smile but something smaller and real. “Buenas noches, Beatriz.”

“Buenas noches, Fernando.”

---

The next morning began as all others did: the bus skimming past vendors setting up, the hotel lobby full of suitcases with stories, the crisp checklist of rooms. But the air around Beatriz felt distinct, as if she’d stepped through an invisible gate. She greeted the receptionist, retrieved her cart, and found Ana waiting near the linen closet with the explosion of a gossip grenade ready on her tongue.

“Tell me everything,” Ana whispered. “Is he—did you—”

Beatriz put a hand up, firm but kind. “I had dinner with someone important and now I have to clean the penthouse bathroom. Life is balance.” She winked. “Later.”

As she turned the corner to the service elevator, she nearly collided with Teresa. The older woman was alone, hands folded around a small paper bag with the hotel bakery’s logo. Up close, Teresa’s face revealed the fine map of a life lived in both sunlight and storm. She did not look like a woman who had ever gotten lost.

“May I walk with you?” Teresa asked, as though asking for a dance.

Beatriz hesitated, then nodded. They stepped into the elevator, the soft music doing its best to pretend that everything was always fine.

“I didn’t call the press,” Teresa said simply, without preamble. “Ignacio would not do it so clumsily. Julio doesn’t understand the internet; he still prints emails.” A flicker of amusement there. “Someone else wanted a spectacle. It will pass.”

“It always does,” Beatriz said. “But only after it hurts.”

Teresa studied her. “What is your mother like?”

“Stubborn, tender, impossible,” Beatriz said. “She once sold her wedding ring to pay for my schoolbooks, then bought it back with the money I made selling tamales two years later. She pretends she doesn’t remember the first part.”

Teresa smiled. “You told Ignacio that you work. It was a correction to a man who never thinks he needs correction. Thank you.”

Beatriz blinked. “For what?”

“For making my son choose in public,” Teresa said. “He hides in competence. It is a good hiding place. But not forever.”

The elevator chimed. The doors opened on the penthouse hallway, which smelled faintly of lilies again, and of something else—anticipation. Teresa held out the paper bag.

“Conchas,” she said. “From the bakery. I find that when the world insists on being dramatic, it helps to have sweet bread in the house.” She paused. “Also, my mother asked that you join us for Sunday lunch regardless of certificates. She said, ‘If the girl can survive Ignacio, she can survive my caldo.’”

Beatriz laughed, the sound surprising them both with its brightness. “Tell her I like caldo that tells the truth.”

“Luisa will like that,” Teresa said. She inclined her head with the small grace of a queen acknowledging a contender. “Good day, Beatriz.”

“Good day, señora.”

As Teresa walked away, Beatriz stood for a moment holding the bag of conchas, their sugar dusting the air. She felt a ridiculous urge to cry and didn’t. Instead she tucked the bag carefully into her cart and rolled it toward the penthouse, where a bathroom waited to be made to gleam.

---

It would be simpler to say that everything afterward unfolded as if guided by a benevolent hand. It didn’t. The gossip site ran a follow-up. Ignacio called with a “friendly” suggestion that a prenuptial agreement be signed retroactively, “for the family’s peace of mind.” Luisa phoned Beatriz directly and asked if she had ever cheated at lotería. (“Once,” Beatriz confessed. “I was seven. I took an extra bean.” “Good,” Luisa said. “You learned what it costs.”)

But when Sunday arrived, and the Navarro home in Lomas de Chapultepec filled with the smell of cilantro and chicken broth, Fernando stood up in front of his family and said something that made Beatriz press her palms together under the table to keep steady.

“I lied to you on Friday,” he said, with a calm that belonged to a man who had slept and decided. “Not about Beatriz being my wife. About why. I wanted to avoid a conversation that I should have had months ago. I called off my last engagement because my fiancée and I wanted different lives. She wanted a position, not a partnership. I made a mess of it because I feared disappointing all of you more than I feared disappointing myself. I am done being afraid.”

He looked at Ignacio, not unkindly. “I will not be cornered into a marriage that suits a merger. If that costs us the deal, so be it. We are not a company that has to sell its soul to survive.”

Luisa clapped once, sharply, like the judge in a courtroom. Teresa exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath since February. Julio looked like a man whose chessboard had been flipped. Alma smiled, fully, for the first time in Beatriz’s presence.

“And Beatriz?” Ignacio asked, still playing his role, still searching for a lever. “What is she to you really, cousin?”

Fernando glanced down the table to where Beatriz sat, his gaze a question and an answer both. “Someone who tells me when I am smaller than I should be,” he said. “Someone I respect.”

The room held the quiet that comes when a new plot declares itself, when the actors realize the scene has veered in a better direction than the script they were handed.

Beatriz felt heat rise at her throat—not from embarrassment this time, but from recognition. There were still lies between them, yes. There was still a payment to exchange in daylight, contracts to sign, boundaries to mark. But in that moment, surrounded by caldo and arguments and the sound of a city breathing beyond the windows, she understood something about the story she’d stepped into: it might yet be one she could help write.

Later, when they stood on the terrace watching the late-afternoon sun lay gold on the jacarandas, Fernando handed Beatriz an envelope.

“This is for Friday,” he said. “Fifty thousand pesos, as promised. And this—” he produced a second envelope, thinner— “is a letter to the registrar at UNAM. A recommendation. My word, not my money.”

Beatriz took both, weighing them, the paper warm from his hands. “I don’t want favors,” she said carefully. “Only the chance to earn.”

“It isn’t a favor,” he said. “It’s the truth told to the right person.”

She tucked the envelopes into her bag. “Then I’ll accept it.”

They stood in comfortable silence, the kind that sits on a bench without fidgeting. The city stretched beyond, a mosaic of lives and mistakes and small brave acts.

“You asked me to lie for you,” she said at last.

“I did,” he admitted.

“And I did,” she said. “But only a little. The rest of it—listening, holding my ground, saying no to indecency—that was the most honest I’ve ever felt.”

He looked at her with something like pride. “Then maybe the lie did what truth sometimes can’t. It put you in a room where the right people could hear you.”

She laughed, surprised into it again. “Don’t get used to me saving you in rooms.”

“I won’t,” he said. “But I might ask you to sit in them with me.”

“Maybe,” she said, and smiled into the Mexico City light—fresh again, impossibly, as if a door had opened onto a morning in March.