Page 84 of Angels Are Falling

“I couldn’t secure a venue for more auditions. We’ll return after Istanbul. We’ll have a venue booked by then.”

“Why are we adding Lebanon to our itinerary?” I stared at the email. “And why am I seeing this now?”

Ruby smiled, tucking her red hair behind her ear. “It was a last-minute thing. Beirut has such a great music scene. One of my friends managed to line up some auditions with some up-and-coming singers. I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.”

Coke had a way of sharpening certain thoughts while blurring others, and the thought that sharpened now had a shape I didn’t entirely like. Ruby had added Lebanon. Beirut specifically. The city that Amelie had described a hundred times. The city that made her homesick.

And Ruby had added it to our itinerary. Without telling me until it was too late to bring Amelie with me.

“Amelie’s from Lebanon. Did you know that?” I asked, keeping my voice casual.

Her brow furrowed. “That’s a coincidence.”

I looked at the itinerary again. The thought was still there, sharper now, taking on an uncomfortable geometry. Did Ruby add Lebanon deliberately? Had she routed me to Amelie’s dream destination on purpose, so that I’d be there without her, so that she would find out, so that… So that what, exactly?

I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye socket.

“Are you all right, Stefan?” Ruby asked.

“Amelie’s been wanting to go back to Lebanon.” I kept my voice neutral. “But it never seemed like the right time.”

“Hm.” Ruby placed her phone in her cross-body purse. She had a way of making a single syllable carry the full weight of a counterargument. “And you want to invite her.”

“Of course I want to invite her.”

“To a work trip.” Ruby looked at me now, not unkindly, just practical. “Stefan, on a good day, we work fourteen hours. Permits, setups, the whole production. You won’t have ten minutes to play tourist.”

“I wouldn’t have to,” I argued. “She is from there.”

Ruby sipped on her drink, shaking her head. “It’s a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Because a lot of these guys have wives and girlfriends. I’m sure they would have loved to bring them along, too.”

“I’ll pay for her fucking ticket. It’s not like I’m putting it on the company dime.”

“You are the company. The president. What does it say that you get paid enough to bring your loved one when no one else can afford it? The optics aren’t great.”

Optics. That was exactly what Kai had said.

“I’m just saying this as your friend,” she continued. “You can obviously do as you please.”

“Fuck, you’re right.” I closed my eyes, yielding. “I’m just not looking forward to telling her about this.”

She shrugged. “Then don’t tell her.”

My face went blank. Amelie and I didn’t lie to each other.

“Look, if you tell her now, the night before we land, she’s going to think you knew about it all along and didn’t invite her purposefully. She’ll just be upset. You can tell her that you didn’t know sooner, but that’s not what she’ll hear. She’ll only hear that you’re visiting Beirut without her.”

The logic of it was airtight. That was the thing about Ruby. She understood relationships with a clear-eyed, unsentimental efficiency that I found refreshing.

“Don’t tell her,” Ruby pressed. “It’ll upset her, then you’ll spend the whole time managing her feelings from eight time zones away.” She punched me playfully. “Which means my work husband will be too emotionally distraught to do his job. None of us wants that. Do you?”

I stared at the email.

She glanced at me sidelong. “It’s one city,” she pressed. “You’ll take her back to Lebanon some other time. Do it for an anniversary or something.” She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made the thing she was suggesting sound entirely reasonable. “Don’t make this into a whole thing when it doesn’t have to be.”