Chapter 35: One Day Less
He didn't sleep.
He sat at the hotel window and watched the lake change — black to grey to the pale silver of early morning — and he thought about everything that had accumulated over the past four days with the particular relentlessness of things that cannot be put down simply because the hour is unreasonable.
He thought about Matteo. About four years. About the specific quality of a betrayal that comes not from an enemy but from the person you built no wall against because the idea of building a wall against them was the idea of building a wall against yourself.
He thought about the vault. The inner door. Three inches of darkness that had been waiting ten years for a complete recording that was currently in Pedro's possession.
He thought about Pedro's photograph — the grainy European street, the two figures, the woman whose posture he had been trying to name since yesterday morning without being able to complete the act of naming it.
