Page 14 of The Lion in the Library

“I should fire him.”

“You probably shouldn’t,” I said. “He seems to genuinely care about you. He just expresses it commercially.”

She looked at me for a moment, something shifting in her expression. Then: “He brought news. They’re expanding my role. More scenes, more dialogue.”

I felt a genuine rush of pleasure at this — not the polite congratulations I’d have offered a colleague, but something more personal, more invested. “Estrella, that’s wonderful.”

“Yes,” she said, and the smile that crossed her face was unguarded and brilliant and briefly knocked every prepared sentence out of my head.

Pedro solved this problem by launching himself at my legs.

“LEO. We are GOING. TO. THE BEACH.”

“We are,” I agreed, recovering. “And I have been reliably informed that we are building the biggest sandcastle in California.”

“I informed you,” Pedro said, with great dignity.

“You did. Very reliable source.”

Luz appeared at my elbow with her backpack and a small stuffed lion wearing, I now noticed, a pair of miniature swimming goggles fashioned from pipe cleaners and circles of cardboard. “León is coming too,” she informed me. “He’s the official sandcastle inspector. He has very high standards.”

I examined León gravely. He examined me back through his cardboard goggles. “I’ll try not to disappoint him.”

“He’s very encouraging,” Luz said, which seemed designed to make me feel better about my chances.

The drive to the beach was an education.

Pedro, who had previously seemed like a fairly quiet child, turned out to operate at a different volume when seatbelted into the back of a car with an audience. He had questions about football — very specific questions, the kind that suggested someone had been doing research — and about Spain, and about whether a sandcastle could theoretically have a working drawbridge, and what I thought about octopuses.

“They’re very intelligent,” I said, on the subject of octopuses.

“More intelligent than footballers?” Luz asked, from the opposite side of the backseat, in a tone that suggested the answer might not go in my favour.

“Probably,” I admitted.

Estrella made a sound in the passenger seat that was almost certainly a suppressed laugh. I caught her eye in the mirror. She looked away, but not quickly enough.

I found the spot I’d scoped the day before — close enough to the water, far enough from the main cluster of families, with good sightlines and, importantly, one natural route of exit should we need to move fast. Fifteen years of navigating public spaces had made me automatic about these things. I didn’t mention the exit assessment to Estrella.

“Perfect,” Pedro announced, surveying the beach with the authority of a man whose sandcastle ambitions required significant real estate.

What I knew about applying sunscreen to children: nothing. What I knew about pre-match preparation: everything. I approached the problem the same way I would approach the latter.

“Arms first,” I said, settling Pedro in front of me. “Then legs. Then face —”

“You missed his ear,” Luz said.

I applied sunscreen to Pedro’s ear.

“The other one.”

Pedro submitted to this process with the patience of someone accustomed to it, gazing at the ocean while I worked. León sat beside him in the sand, goggles on, technically supervising.

“You’re very thorough,” Estrella said, from where she was setting up the blankets.

“My left knee required three surgeries,” I told her. “I have a deep respect for preventive care.”

She looked at me. “That’s not the same thing.”