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a couple of months
she would be twenty-eight, and that would make it not nine but ten years
since she’d left the convent in Mexico and joined the Cardinal in his work. A
decade, most of it spent waiting for her next assignment, sometimes months at a
time, visiting the greatest cities on Earth, and travelling in pampered luxury
wherever she went.
    Yes, in a couple of months it would be a full ten years ago that she
had gone to New York, straight from Mexico City, on the very day of her eighteenth
birthday. And a day later, ensconced at the Marriot on Times Square, she
had lost her virginity to one of the warmest and most remarkable men she had
ever met.
    Jason had been sweet, innocent, and bursting with desire for her.
She knew as soon as she saw him that he was the one. And when she felt him
slowly enter her for the first time, it had seemed so natural she wanted desperately
to tell him how perfect he was. Instead, she had simply held him close and
whispered yes . It didn’t mean yes, this is good ; it meant, yes,
this is right , this is absolutely everything it should be.
    Over the years she’d kept in touch with Jason. He was a computer
programmer, fresh out of Brown when they met. After a few years chasing the
hi-tech dream in Silicon Valley, he’d become a technology teacher in an
Oklahoma high school. He was always glad to hear from her, if sometimes a
little distant, as if that chance meeting in New York was a world away, a dream
that would fade if he were not coaxed into remembering it again each time Carol
Schmidt mailed.
    That’s all it had been, too. Just the occasional e-mail, no
meetings, no rekindling of the passion they had both felt in New York. He’d
been willing, right from the outset, but she’d gotten herself a job with the
Cardinal, and long-term relationships were not really compatible with her line
of work.
    For ten years, then, she and Jason had never met again. But she knew
what he looked like. The tech department at his school had a gallery on its
website, and there are even a couple of videos of him on YouTube, taken a
couple years earlier when a solar-powered car made by his students had won
first prize at a county science fair.
    In the videos he looked tired and a bit saggy, as if the years had
weighed down more heavily on his shoulders than had seemed possible back in New
York, when he had been a fresh-faced graduate with a glittering career ahead of
him. She knew that he’d had his disappointments, one of the many casualties of
the tech market that people never see when they read about the success stories.
In science classrooms the length and breadth of the country are men and women
who came close to making it big, guys like Jason who had an idea, who pitched
it, developed it, dreamed of the yachts and the helicopters... all for nothing.
    “Screw it,” she said, clicking Skype open and waiting for its
familiar “pop” sound.
    She did a search and found seven people with his name in Oklahoma. Instantly
she recognized his face.
    Her finger hovered over his face a while, wondering whether this was
really fair. He had two kids, she knew, and a wife who rarely got much of a
mention in his light, jokey e-mails. Did Jason really need this, to see her
again, after all this time? And did she want to see him?
    “What’s the worst that can happen?” she asked herself, pressing an
index finger into the screen and waiting for the ring tone.
    “Oh, shit,” she said, as Skype told he was off-line.
    She’d have to add him as a contact and ring him later.
    Almost relieved, she tossed the iPad onto the pillow beside her and
stretched out on the bed. There was chilled lobster on a trolley close by, but
she didn’t fancy it yet. All she wanted to do was stare at the ceiling.
    Almost without noticing, her mind had begun to relive those two
fantastic nights she spent with Jason in New York. Nights and days; the
two of them had been inseparable, dashing from museums to theatres and
restaurants, and