Julia bites her lip.
“I’m tired of this,” she says, walking away.
“Where are you going?” he calls after her.
“Like you care.”
“For Pete’s sake, Julia.”
“Go to hell, Leo.”
It feels good, making him suffer.
*
Julia moves through the narrow streets at a fast clip, doing her best to ignore the tightness in her chest. She chides herself for losing control. Emotion had hijacked her usual self-restraint, and the mean and petty words spilled from her mouth before she could stop them.
She turns right, and men with mustaches selling leather jackets and Turkish rugs call out to her with their best offers. Ignoring them, she carries on, stopping to buy a drink from a vendor wearing a T-shirt stained with pomegranate juice. She cracks open the bottle and takes a mouthful. Cold. Wet. It makes her feel better. She sits on a bench shaded by an olive tree where two dogs are playing rough and tumble on the grassy area in front of her. Strays. White coats dirty and gray. Thin but fed.
She watches them. She can’t remember the last time she’d had fun like that. Maybe with Leo a few years ago and the jet boat ride he surprised her with for her birthday. The freezing water nearly blistered her skin, but she’d never felt so exhilarated. Then Toni came back, gaunt and bedraggled, begging for help, and everything changed.
At the time, Julia couldn’t quite put her finger on it. There was something different but she didn’t know what. She began noticing little things. For instance, whenever she walked into a room, Toni and Leo would somehow always be on opposite sides. And the times the three of them ate together, Toni and Leo would never look at each other. There was also the incident when Toni tripped over the rug in the kitchen and fell to the floor and Leo didn’t go to help her up.
Then one day they both came to her.
“We need to talk,” said Toni more serious than Julia had ever seen her before.
At the time, a myriad of things had popped into Julia’s head. Another debt? Criminal charges? A relapse? Then Julia realized they were both looking at her like she had cancer and didn’t know it.
“I can’t do this,” Leo had said, turning to leave.
Toni stopped him. “Leo, she deserves to know the truth.”
Julia had shaken her head, confused. “What truth? What the heck are you two talking about?”
Toni grabbed Julia’s hand with tears in her eyes. “We made a mistake. A terrible mistake. You have to forgive us.”
Then the shoe finally dropped. The two people Julia loved most in the world had betrayed her in the worst possible way. A three-month affair right under her nose.
Thinking about it now, she feels sick, all those months of pain she endured, the heartbreak she never thought she’d get over, how goddamn stupid she had felt. Julia lifts her head and watches one of the stray dogs bound over to a stranger holding out a chunk of bread. She wishes she could be like that dog, living from one moment to the next, no betrayals from the past to hold her back. She stays there a while longer, thinking about how emotional wounds run so much deeper than physical ones and how they could ruin your life if you let them.
28
It’s growing dark by the time Julia returns to the hotel. The foyer is empty and Ada is nowhere to be seen, despite her playing cards being laid out in their familiar pyramid pattern on the glass-topped coffee table. Julia heads for the elevator, halting when she spots Leo glued to a computer screen in the business center.
She steps into the doorway. “Leo, I want to put it behind us.”
He looks over his shoulder. “Oh, hi.”
“I mean it,” she says.
“Okay.”
“I’m sick of thinking about it,” she says.
He turns around to look at her properly. “I don’t know how many times you want me to say I’m sorry, Julia.”
Every day for the rest of your life, she thinks. But she bites her tongue.
“Losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me and I’m sorry I hurt you,” he says.
She knows he means it, but it still doesn’t help.
“It happened and it hurt but there’s nothing we can do about it now so let’s just move on.”
“Julia.”
She turns away. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Leo presses his lips together and gives her a perfunctory nod. “If that’s what you want.”
She looks at the computer screen. “What are you doing in here anyway?”
“Research.”
“Research?”
“I might have found something.” He hands her a stack of printouts. “I did a search on missing women in Turkey. What Christine Fletcher says is true. Organized crime syndicates are active in the area as far as human trafficking is concerned, women in particular, but also kids. It’s possible that Toni could have been taken by one of the groups. She’s pretty, still young enough to be a money earner, and although Sally said that Toni was off drugs, we both know there’s also a chance she wasn’t, which means Toni could’ve been in contact with some unsavory types. On the other hand, the kidnapping of an American tourist for the purposes of white slavery is rare. These syndicates tend to target and recruit girls from Eastern Europe and Asia. They trick the girls into coming abroad to work as models or hostesses, which is probably exactly what happened to thar poor girl back there in the morgue. And the dumping of Toni’s backpack…it just doesn’t feel right. Her money and passport were still in there and the kidnappers like to hold onto passports as a way to control the girls.”
“So no to a white slavery kidnapping?”
Leo nods. “Yeah, I think it’s unlikely.”
“What then?”
He clicks open
