Page 138 of The Lies We Play

Despite everything, a laugh breaks out of me.

It is not a healthy sound.

Fitz ignores it.

“Lang has someone who can get a phone to Halston within twenty-four hours. Maybe sooner. After that, Halston stops using every device tied to the estate. No texts from his phone. No emails from his accounts. No searching names on his laptop.”

“He searched me.”

A small pause on the line.

“Yes,” Fitz says.

“Fuck.”

“Lang already took care of it.”

I sit forward. “What do you mean already?”

Fitz hesitates.

Lang answers from the background. “We’ve had a passive trace on Halston’s digital life since you and I had drinks four years ago. Low-level standing protocol. Any time his name surfaced in unusual queries, I got pinged. Tonight was a big ping.”

I stare at the counter.

“You’ve been watching him.”

“I’ve been watching the signal. Tonight he searched you, and he searched her, and he did it from a device tied to the estate, and I cleaned what I could before the cookies were sent home.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because there was nothing to tell, until tonight.”

I swallow.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Don’t . . .” Lang groans. “Just don’t make my work harder.”

“What about Livia?” I ask.

“Working on it.”

“Where is she?”

Another pause.

“Italy.”

I breathe in, slowly. The information should not change anything. I already knew, from Fitz, that she was in Italy. Florence is a more specific shape of the same fact. But there is something about hearing the name of a city—a city I have walked through twice, on hockey trips when I was twenty-two, before any of this happened, when she had never been there—that makes the world too small.

She has been within the same map as me the whole time.

“Where in Italy?”

“Don’t,” Fitz says.

“I wasn’t going to⁠—”