Page 9 of The Enforcer

4Zoe

“This is beautiful,”I say, staring at maybe the third gorgeous square we’ve stumbled through on our way from our hotel to the address KeKe sent me.

Shae nods, but she’s not paying attention. If I didn’t know her better, I’d think she was running scared from the cops, the way she’s looking from left to right. But Shae can’t even steal a candy bar without freaking out about going to jail and confessing all her sins — and incriminating Zahra and I right along with her. I wanted to throttle her as a child for being the worst accomplice ever, but as an adult, her innocence is one of the things I love most about her.

“Girl, what the hell is going on with you?”

“Huh?”

I roll my eyes. “Don’t ‘huh’ me. What is up with you?”

“Nothing. I’m hungry. Tired?”

“Which is it?”

“Both?”

I stop walking and grab her forearm. I try and look her in the eyes, but she won’t meet my gaze, which isn’t so out of the ordinary, but this entire trip has been so strange that it’s hard to read her distraction in any other way besides deeply confusing, and maybe even a little bit scary.

“Okay, what the fuck is going on right now?” I explode.

Shae jumps at the sound of my voice.

“Look,” I say carefully, letting her arm go. “I don’t want to press you. It’s not my business, but…” My eyes go to her stomach. I think about all of our girly dreams to be just like our mothers, attached at the hips and raising our children side by side. Even me, the person who didn’t want children — I still wanted to be right there as my little sister and cousin inevitably had theirs. I’ve been preparing to be the best carefree, rich auntie to ever show up at the cookout with a bottle of champagne, a store-bought cake, and a new man on her arm since I was twelve. This has been my goal, but in my mind, I thought we’d all be older, settled, and surer of ourselves. I certainly never thought that Shae would tie herself to someone as basic as Steve. I mean, Shae deserves better. More.

And so do I.

Something about the way Shae’s avoiding my eyes as if she can feel my failure cuts me deep. It’s as if she knows how it hurt, how hard that shock reverberated, when Kevin asked me to get pregnant even though I’d always been very clear that kids were not just off the table, there was no table for that discussion at all. As if she’d been next to me on the train uptown with a dry, scratchy throat and watery eyes, stubbornly refusing to let even a single tear drop. So, now I’m avoiding her eyes.

We’re looking everywhere but at one another as we resume our hunt for Zahra. We listen to the voice commands on the app leading us through Naples’s streets, holding our secrets closer to our chests than before. I want to believe that every step brings us closer to Zahra, but that’s just the quarterly dose of unfounded optimism hitting my veins because I’m too tired to drown it out with cynicism. But eventually, this kind of naïveté will fade, and what if we haven’t found Zahra before it does? Then what will I do?

This train of thought is ruining my mood and feels wholly out of place considering the beautiful city around us.

“Your destination is on the left.”

Instead of looking left, I look down at my phone, but Shae’s gasp pulls my eyes to her.

“Oh my God.”

I look at her and then across the paved square to the restaurant and back again. Shae’s stopped walking, and I turn around in confusion. “What’s up? Did you see her?”

I turn around in a circle, looking everywhere for Zahra and seeing her nowhere. I feel like I’m going insane. It’s probably just jet lag, but I don’t care. It’s been a weird couple of days, and the red-faced nervous look on Shae’s face is freaking me out, so I take off.

“Zoe,” Shae calls after me, but I don’t stop. I stomp across that brick square toward the restaurant.

I can hear Shae running after me, even as my name sounds more unhinged each time she says it. I pull the door open — a little dramatically — and rush inside a very normal restaurant. It looks like something out of a quaint movie set. It’s actually a little disorienting if I’m honest. Two seconds ago, I felt like there was pure panic running through my veins, but when I step into this place, a sense of calm settles over me. But that’s probably because of the quiet.

I scan the room, and it’s mostly empty, full of far more chairs than people. There’s a gray-haired man sitting at a small table in the corner, peering at me over the top of his newspaper. I can hear the sounds of people in the kitchen, but when I look in that direction, I find a white man with light brown hair leaning forward on the bar staring at me. Hard. The look on his face is the definition of thirsty, so I roll my eyes and look away. There’s a waitress at a table to my left taking orders.

But that’s it. There’s no Zahra.

This is fine. It’s not a sign of my failures accumulating one on top of the other. It’s only the first day, we haven’t even been in the country for twelve hours, but I’d let myself imagine that it could be that easy, which is so unlike me. Yeah, jet lag is really about to kick my entire ass on this trip. The only way to save myself is to find my foolish little sister quick and get back to the States before my body can fully acknowledge that I’ve left home.

I turn around, looking for my cousin, and I see her standing outside in the square, her eyes and mouth wide in shock — as if she’s afraid to get too close to the door. I shake my head and push the door open. “Shae, what the hell? She’s not here. What is going on?”

She’s biting her bottom lip and wringing her hands. She looks worse than just after she threw up on the airplane. She’s looking past me, though, and I feel as if she and I are living in two different universes.

It’s not until the front door of the restaurant bangs open behind me that I realize how badly I’ve been misreading my cousin for the past few hours.

Some investigative journalist I am.

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