Chapter 4
Jyn’s jet was a Bombardier Global 7500 and it did, in fact, have cargo space, though it was generally used for things considerably more expensive than a forty-two-inch flatscreen and a collection of Nia’s graphic design hard drives.
She discovered this at thirty-five minutes past midnight, when they were loading into vehicles in Jyn’s underground garage and she realized she was actually doing this — she was actually getting into a convoy with a man she had known as the neighbor for three weeks and as a ghost of a memory for three years, carrying her sleeping toddler in her arms and her grandmother’s Bible in her bag and approximately four days of clothes because she hadn’t known what to pack for indefinite duration, international, reason: survival.
Leo woke up in the car when the convoy moved.
He looked at Jyn in the seat across from them with the serious evaluative gaze that was becoming very familiar to her now that she understood exactly where Leo got it from.
“Doggie,” Leo said, looking around. “Where doggie?”
“Thor is in the car behind us,” Jyn said.
Leo processed this. He seemed to accept it. He put his head back on Nia’s shoulder and went back to sleep with the absolute trust of a two-and-a-half-year-old who had decided the situation was manageable.
“He’s not afraid of you,” Nia said quietly, so as not to wake him.
“No,” Jyn said.
“He was afraid of our landlord for three months.”
“Children sense things.”
“Dogs sense things. Children are unpredictable.”
Jyn looked at Leo sleeping against her shoulder with an expression she would have described, if she’d been describing it to Zoe, as terrifyingly unguarded for a man who owns a private jet and apparently runs some kind of century-old business empire. It was the look of someone encountering something that bypassed all their defenses not through force but through the simple factual nature of its existence.
Leo existed. Therefore Jyn could not be impenetrable. It was just math.
“He has your stubbornness,” Jyn said.
“He’s two and a half. He’s stubborn because he’s two and a half.”
“He also has your chin.”
Nia looked down at her sleeping son. “He has your eyes.”
The silence that followed was the kind that acknowledges something rather than avoids it.
“I’m not saying yes,” Nia said carefully, “to the ring. Not tonight. Tonight I’m saying yes to Switzerland because my family is safer and Leo is safer and I am not going to be proud when the alternative is a hand reaching through a fence for my child.”
“That’s enough,” Jyn said.
“But we are going to have a conversation when we get there. A real one. About Leo and about you and about what this looks like going forward, and I need you to understand that I do not function well in arrangements where I am not told what is happening.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do, because you have a secretary called Secretary Han and a bodyguard called Viper and you operate through shell companies, and none of that suggests a communication style that I would describe as transparent.”
Jyn looked at her. “I have never met anyone like you,” he said.
“Is that good or bad?”
“It is,” he said slowly, “entirely unprecedented.”
She took that as a provisional compliment and looked out the window at the city disappearing into the distance, at the lights she had grown up under, at Gigi’s block receding behind them with the small, precise ache of leaving something you haven’t agreed to leave permanently.
Her phone buzzed. Zoe: okay Marcus said you’re going to switzerland in a private jet please tell me this is real and also please bring me back chocolate.
Nia smiled at her phone.
It’s real, she typed back. And Zoe — we have to talk when this is over.
I KNOW I SAW THE RING BOX ON THE KITCHEN TABLE I AM SHRIEKING.
You went through my house?
I was getting the good olive oil because if we’re going to live in a safe house we need quality ingredients.
Nia put her phone in her pocket.
Leo shifted in her arms, resettled, made the small satisfied sound he made when he was completely comfortable. Across the seat, Jyn watched his son sleep with the careful attention of a man trying to memorize something before it disappears.
It was, she thought, probably the most honest thing she had seen him do.
