I had been running on the flat, humming adrenaline that carries you through a crisis and leaves you hollow afterward, and I remember thinking, almost with relief, that the worst was behind us — that we had gotten out, that the danger was a single terrible evening now safely in the past tense.

Then Javier stepped into the hall to take the call, and I watched through the window in the door as something changed in his shoulders, and when he came back in he sat down slowly and would not quite meet my eyes at first, and I understood that whatever this was, it was not going to end tonight, and it was not going to be small.

He told me, carefully, what an investigator had just found.

Dario had been married twice before.