Sofia was astonished to discover that her mother, too, wished things had been different between them.
“I never knew the significance of the flash drive until John asked about some proof he’d heard you mention while you were in the cellar with Aish.”
In the cellar. With Aish. The only time she’d been in the cellar with him was when she’d fucked him. Her skin crawled at the idea that John had been there, in the dark, listening. Listening to her assault his “best friend.”
“Juan Carlos called me this evening, frantic, with a wild story.” Her mother ran a trembling hand down her ponytail and Sofia distantly recognized it as a move she’d once used to comfort herself. “He said that the man we’d been working with was Aish’s dead bandmate, that the man had lost his mind, that he was going to make it so Aish would never be seen again. Juan Carlos said we had to get our story straight so we couldn’t be held responsible.”
Sofia suddenly had trouble catching her breath. Something was filling her chest, pressing against her lungs, clogging her throat. She put her hand against her heart. She looked up, confused, at Carmen Louisa, at her brother and Henry. She opened her mouth, but could get no air in or out.
Oh God. Aish was lost in her kingdom with a psychopath.
Henry’s blue eyes went wide before he was charging toward her and shoving her forward, forcing her head between her knees. “Breathe, girl,” he barked. “You’re having a panic attack.”
She felt other hands on her back, rubbing up and down. “Respira, mi hija. Cálmate, mi amor.”
Instant tears popped into her eyes. She let her head hang and let her mother rub her back and tried not to think about never seeing or touching or kissing Aish again.
On her first full inhale she said, “We’ve got to...we’ve got to go save him,” she finally gasped out, head still between her knees.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Roman said. “I’ll find him.”
She had no breath, or time, or need to argue with him.
“If you knew...the Monte like I do...you would have caught him already.” Because who else could the vandal and the person who’d assaulted her worker be but John?
It was a low blow but never was wah-wahing in Sofia’s ear. Never seeing or touching or kissing Aish ever again. She’d said never over and over again during the last decade, stroked her hip again and again as she repeated it like an incantation, an incantation that had apparently worked because it had kept her shielded from Aish’s world-dominating fame. “I will never fall in love with you again. I will never, ever, ever forgive you.” But, for all of her denial of his existence, her never still involved Aish existing, out in the world somewhere, playing his music, living his life, filling someone else’s days with his love and spirit and warmth.
Only now, she discovered, that within her never, she’d always hidden the possibility of maybe.
This never was Aish gone. His fire extinguished. The space his big spirit took up in the world icy cold.
He’d broken her a decade ago. Then he spent the next ten years writing her songs and learning her language and inking odes into his body. Was that simply the response of a guilty conscious? Or something more? What would he have said if she’d allowed him to complete the apologies he’d attempted so many times? Could she forgive him?
He’d planned on sacrificing his career for her this afternoon. “You’re my first love. You’re my last love. You’re the only woman I’ll ever love.”
They’d dived effortlessly into loving each other as children. Maybe they needed a chance to see if they could do the hard, mountain-climbing work of loving each other as adults.
Her breath was coming easier now. She straightened and closed her eyes, gripped her hip, fortified herself with big inhales of air, taking in the leather-and-gun-oil smell of Roman’s home, the aroma of her wine, the soft scent of her mother because for once she wasn’t drenched in—
Sofia’s eyes snapped open. Cologne. That rank whiff of it when she’d been in the cellar with Aish. She’d smelled it earlier, too. When? In the basement of the bar when they almost kissed. When someone took the photo.
She asked Carmen Louisa to find the picture from the news story. Then she pointed at Roman. “Dime otra vez, what businesses had the vandalism?”
They both looked at her like she was losing her mind. “Rapidamente,” she urged.
As Roman rattled off the businesses, Sofia tracked their location in her mind. Joder. Of course. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t put it together before.
When Carmen Louisa handed her the phone, it was the verification Sofia needed.
“I know where he has Aish,” she said, flipping the screen around. She pointed at the photo. “We thought one of the interns took this picture. But the angle is wrong; this was taken from the back of the room. Where there is a gate that leads into the tunnel. The tunnels connect all of the vandalized businesses and the winery; that’s how John has been getting around and how he snuck into Bodega Sofia. That’s where they’ve gone now.”
Carmen Louisa nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes, Manon was asking about the tunnels.”
A cold certainty dropped into Sofia’s stomach. “And if John wanted to get rid of Aish so we could never find him, I know exactly where he’d take him.” Those careless stories she’d shared about the tunnels so long ago. She swallowed her fear as she looked at her brother. “We need to go right now.”
With one nod, Roman pulled his phone out and began contacting his team.
She bit back a laugh of hysteria. After all her bemoaning and complaining, her self-pity and sadness, Aish
