Page 284 of The Lies We Play

“Signorina Crane.”

“Yes.”

“Please.”

He opens the door, I get inside immediately.

The car pulls into the street while I’m still putting my seat belt on, and Florence begins to move past my window in the strange way a city moves when you’re leaving it and don't yet know whether it is for the last time.

Stone walls.

Closed shutters.

A narrow street shining under late light.

A woman walking a small dog beneath an umbrella.

The bakery on the corner, where I learned to order without rehearsing the sentence first.

My life, all of it, receding with no ceremony.

I press the side button on my phone.

Airplane mode.

The little orange icon comes on, and eight years go quiet in my hand.

Peretola is twenty-two minutes from my front door. The driver doesn’t take the route I would have taken. He doesn’t stop at lights I would have stopped at. He doesn’t speak. At a service gate I’ve never seen, he produces a card out of nowhere, and we drive across the tarmac in the dark toward a private jet sitting alone on a strip of asphalt with its stairs down and its cabin lit gold from inside.

A man waits at the bottom of the stairs.

Tall. Probably mid-thirties. Dark hair cut close. He looks composed in the way people look composed when lives have depended on them more than once.

“Livia Crane,” he says. “Welcome. I’m Finnegan Gil. I’ll be your pilot tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“After you.”

He gestures toward the stairs.

The driver hands my bag to another man, almost as tall as Finnegan, older by a few years, and built with the same quiet capability. Not staff exactly. Not only security. Something in between. He seems like a man who has carried luggage and bodies and bad news without needing to be thanked for any of it.

The cabin is bigger than my apartment.

Cream leather seats arranged in pairs and a four-seat conference grouping at the back. A galley to the left with espresso equipment a Florence barista would respect. Real wood paneling. A small couch along one wall that converts to a bed. Lamps with shades. A vase with white peonies bolted to the cabinet between the windows because turbulence is real, and someone wanted peonies anyway.

“Derek, ready?” Finnegan asks.

“Almost,” the other man answers, setting my luggage into a cabinet.

Finnegan watches him a second longer than the question requires.

Not openly.

Not carelessly.

But I see it.