Thom pulled away from Ann-Sophie and spoke to Lisa before she could speak to him. “Where are the kids?”
“On board.”
It occurred to Thom later—much later—that if your wife, the mother of your children, is angry with you for a thousand offenses and holds myriad grievances and you’re about to go into isolation together and you’d rather not enrage her further, it is better to direct questions about her children’s welfare to her and not to your assistant.
Lisa, no dummy, caught herself after her instinctive two-word reply and gestured to Ann-Sophie, as if to cede the matter to her. Ann-Sophie just shook her head, the question already answered. “Yep.”
“Bags?”
Lisa hesitated. She was a likable person, brisk, competent, and not looking to her job for social advancement. She was extremely well paid, which was all she asked, aside from a modicum of respect, which she got from everyone she dealt with except Thom. Her boss could be snappish, demanding, and never, ever remembered a single personal detail she shared with him. In that regard, Thom’s spouse and his assistant had an unspoken sense of allegiance, and an uneasy peace.
Ann-Sophie answered Thom’s question about the luggage on Lisa’s behalf, completing the role reversal between spouse and personal assistant. “The bags are on the plane, Thom. The clothes were last washed a week ago, the phones are charged, and the batteries were all refreshed in February.” She looked at Lisa. “Would you like me to tell him?”
Thom looked back and forth between them. “Tell me what? What’s going on? Why are we—”
He stopped mid-sentence as the first Suburban, the one from which Ann-Sophie had alighted, was pulling away, giving him a clear view of the air stair that had been folded down from the Gulfstream. There, standing at the base of it, was a tall, athletic-looking man in his mid-forties in a crisp pilot’s uniform and aviator shades. Marques fully looked the part of the former Air Force pilot turned sky chauffeur and he was, in many ways, Thom’s favorite accoutrement of his success. His own pilot, a decorated veteran, no less, who was ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. And there he stood now, tall, fit, shoulders squared, chest thrust out, ready to lift them all the hell out of there and tear into the sky, headed for safety while the world lit on fire beneath them.
But Marques was not alone.
For a moment, Thom didn’t understand the image. His brain couldn’t decode the light waves that were reaching his retinas, couldn’t turn them into a rational perception that matched his understanding of reality. Marques, his pilot, his transportation guru, his getaway driver, for God’s sake, was not alone. There was a Black woman next to him, six or seven years younger than Marques, with the fingers of her right hand interlaced with the fingers of his left. OK, so Marques had a woman with him.
But it got even weirder. Because the woman, the one who was acting like Marques’s, uh, companion or something, had another human beside her. This person was small—maybe three feet high, so what’s that, four years old or so?—and this undersized human was clinging to the left leg of the woman for support and safety.
Marques has a fucking wife and kid? And he brought them?
“Marques needs to speak with you,” Lisa offered, pointlessly.
“No,” Thom said.
She hadn’t asked a question and wasn’t looking for a decision, so Thom’s answer made no real sense, except to him. To him, the single word meant “No, Marques cannot bring his fucking-news-to-me wife and kid to my fucking Sanctuary,” but he was too stunned to get the words out.
Marques, seeing his boss’s face, turned to his apparent spouse, said something quiet and reassuring, stroked the little girl’s hair with a smile and a wink, and walked toward Thom.
Thom met him halfway. “What the fuck, Marques?”
“Got an issue, boss.”
“You’re married?”
“Her name’s Beth. Been together two years now. You sent us a housewarming present last July.”
Thom nodded, thinking. Important not to come off like an asshole here. He needed this guy. “OK. Well, good. Uh, congratulations. But you’re not, you know, married?”
Marques took off his sunglasses. “Like I said. We’ve been together two years.” It was a strong delivery, particularly with the removal of the sunglasses and the steady eye contact.
Thom straightened. He couldn’t match Marques’s height, the deepness of his voice, or the moral authority of the uniform, even if it bore no relation to the military or any official air service or airline. Still, it had epaulets, and they tend to square one’s shoulders rather impressively.