I’d known that even as I’d climbed in my car and driven away. I owe Aria an explanation, I owed it to her to stick around and let her ask the million or so questions she probably has. After all, it isn’t every day that one of your friend calls the man you’re dating a murderer. Or, more precisely, screams it at him. She’d asked me to wait, and I’d tried. I really had. But even as I stood in that deserted parking lot, staring at Janet’s door and seeing the ghosts of a hundred other visits to that very apartment, I knew I had to get out of there. If I’d stayed I would have just fucked everything up. Even now, as I pull up to the valet at the Atlantis, my hands are still shaking on the steering wheel. My stomach’s a twisting knot of sadness and regret, self-loathing and rage. It’s the same emotional cocktail I felt when I walked away from this city ten years ago for what I thought was forever, and it’s the same one that’s dogged my footsteps from Haiti to Costa Rica, from Gaza to Sierra Leone.
