Page 10 of Over Her Dead Body

CHAPTER 5

EMMA

The captain announces our descent into Lisbon and I have never been so grateful to hear a man’s voice in my life, which is saying something because I once listened to a voicemail from a client in Bahrain confirming a seven-figure consignment and that was a very good day.

I have not slept. Ten hours in this seat and I have not closed my eyes once. My neck hurts. My back hurts. Everything hurts in the way that things hurt when you have been holding your body still for a very long time because the alternative was moving and moving meant doing something you couldn’t take back.

Reid stands as soon as the seatbelt sign goes off. Of course he does. He’s the kind of man who has his bag down and his jacket on immediately, which used to make me insane and apparently still does.

I am out of my seat before the aisle can fill, slipping past two people who were technically there first. Under ordinary circumstances, I have manners. These are not ordinary circumstances.

I know how to follow someone without looking like I’m following someone. I have done this exactly once before, at a Frankfurt estate auction, when I needed to know which collector a competing house was courting before the evening session. I was right, incidentally. I am frequently right. It has not always saved me.

Reid moves through the terminal like a man who knows where he’s going. No hesitation at the signs. No checking his phone. He has been here before. He may live here.

Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport is bright and modern and awake in the strange, artificial way airports are awake when the rest of the city has had the good sense to go to bed. I process almost none of it. I have no checked bag. This is both a problem and the only advantage I have right now—I clear the arrival formalities while Reid waits at the carousel.

I buy a portable charger because my phone has been dead for hours.

No one knows I’m here. It sounded like freedom at the gate. It sounded like determination on the plane. Standing in the Lisbon arrivals hall on no sleep, no food, and the wrong side of an ocean, it sounds like a problem.

I find a pillar with a sightline to the exit and I wait.

By the time my phone comes back to life, it delivers eleven messages from Margot. The last two are:

Please tell me you rebooked.

?

The phone rings in my hand.

I decline the call.

This is a terrible thing to do to someone covering a multimillion-dollar estate sale for you. I do it anyway.

He comes through twenty minutes later. Rolling bag, jacket, the unhurried pace of a man with somewhere to be who is not worried about getting there. He takes out his phone. Reads something. Puts it away.

Gets in a cab.

I get in the next one.

The driver glances at me in the mirror. “Where to?”

I point at Reid’s taxi pulling away. “Wherever he’s going.”

The driver pulls out without a question. I love this country already.

I sit back. Lisbon moves past the windows in pieces—tile, stone, streetlights, closed shutters, the occasional bright rectangle of someone still awake. The adrenaline that has been holding me upright for ten hours starts to thin. Underneath it there is something large and exhausted and furious and if I look at it directly I will fall apart in the back of a cab in a country I have never been to.

So I look at Reid’s taillights instead.

Lisbon swallows us both.

Twenty minutes later, Reid’s cab stops on a narrow street in front of a stone building with blue tile around the door. He gets out, takes his bag, and disappears inside.

My cab idles behind it.

This is the moment a sensible person would tell the driver to turn around. Because what if I am wrong? Ten hours without sleep, too much wine, ten years of grief—it is not impossible that something in me has finally slipped. What if I have followed a stranger across an ocean because he takes one sugar in his coffee and has a bad left shoulder?