“You will be older next season,” she adds, sweeping past the moment, casting a worried look my way, as though twenty-three will bring with it a wave of wrinkles and gray hairs that will render me officially on the shelf. “Men like a younger girl. Before the bloom is off the rose.”

My mother was just eighteen when she married my father.

Maria snorts at the comment, and I’m glad this is all a joke to her, that she hasn’t had to face the reality of our situation yet, that our parents consider marriage to be the final goal for us, our success tied to the men we catch rather than our own merits. The realization will come, of course, likely when she is ready to advance her schooling, when she dreams of college or law school as I once did.

Our part-time housekeeper, Alice, walks into the room before my mother can continue telling me my golden years are behind me.

“Pardon me. Miss Beatriz, Mr. Diaz is here to see you. He’s waiting outside.”

Saved by Eduardo.

We haven’t spent much time together since the dynamite night—Eduardo’s been “traveling,” his whereabouts a mystery, but at the moment, I’ll take political intrigue over my mother’s marital machinations.

I paste a smile on my face and rise from the couch, setting my magazine down on the end table.

“I shouldn’t keep Eduardo waiting. After all, time isn’t exactly on my side, is it?” I say, shooting my mother a pointed look.

From Isabel’s position on the couch, a strangled laugh escapes.

* * *

? ? ?

“You saved me,” I tell Eduardo later when we are walking side by side on the beach.

“Did I? I think I like the sound of that. Would you say I’m your hero, then?”

I laugh. “I wouldn’t go quite that far.”

“Humph. What did I save you from?”

“My mother. Voicing her displeasure that society has moved on and we are still here in Palm Beach.” I cast a sidelong look Eduardo’s way as we walk along the beach, my sandals in hand, the skirt of my dress clutched in my fingers as the sand slithers between my toes. “I’m surprised you didn’t leave.”

“Where would I go?” Eduardo looks to the sea, brushing a lock of dark hair from his forehead. It’s grown longer since the season ended, the ends curling.

“New York, perhaps.”

His lip curve with distaste. He knows the game as well as I do. “Trying to marry me off?”

“Would you marry? You have to eventually, don’t you?”

He’s three years older than me, not so old that his single status is unusual, but not so young, either, especially in these uncertain times. It’s different for men, of course, their bachelorhood tolerated far more than our impending spinster status, but still, at the end of the day, we are all meant to marry, have children, live the lives our parents lived before us.

“Marry for love?” he asks.

“Love, position, security.”

Eduardo stiffens slightly, and guilt stabs me. We don’t speak of our reduced circumstances; our pride doesn’t allow it. For a man like Eduardo, it’s a great blow indeed. In Cuba, Eduardo’s family lived like kings, their wealth in the land they owned, the businesses, the horses, an empire built over centuries. There are rumors that his father took money out of the country in the yawning days of Batista’s presidency and before Fidel marched into Havana, but the bulk of their fortune is now in Fidel’s hands.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Would you?” he counters.

“Sell myself to the highest bidder?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes it feels like things would be easier if I did,” I admit. “For my family, at least. It would certainly please my parents.”

“Yes.”

“What will you do when we go back to Cuba?” I ask, changing the subject.

This is one of my favorite games to play.

Eduardo smiles. “Sit on the patio of our house in Varadero and look out at the water, a cigar in hand. Breathe. Admire the legs of the dancers at the Tropicana. Marry some girl willing to put up with me. Have children. Watch them play in the water and know they won’t live under the same fear we’ve experienced, that they will grow up in a world where they can put down roots, where they can hold on to something without the fear it will be ripped away.”

“You want a family?”

“I do.”

“I wouldn’t have predicted that.” Whenever I take Eduardo at face value, somehow he always seems to surprise me.

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one for entanglements, that you would view a family as more of a burden than anything else.”

I’m fairly convinced our father sees me, my mother, and my sisters the same way; he loves us, but we’re another thing to manage and care for, to fret over.

“I suppose it would depend on why I married,” Eduardo answers. “If I chose a wife to get me out of this mess, married some American girl with the right last name and the kind of connections that would ensure a lifetime of smooth sailing, it would probably feel more like a burden than a joy. Don’t mistake me; money makes everything easier, and don’t think I haven’t considered taking the easy way, but—”

“You’re a romantic.” The notion surprises me.

He gives an embarrassed little laugh. “Isn’t that the whole point? Why are we doing any of this if not for the romanticism of it?”

“I suppose I thought it was about reclaiming the things you lost,” I admit, momentarily abashed by the possibility that I’ve misjudged him, that this whole time I’ve chalked his motives up to his own self-interest, when perhaps there was more there, his intentions more altruistic.

“It is. But those things aren’t just the ones that can be bought. There are other things we lost, too. Ones you can’t put a price on or replicate.”

“No matter how much my father tries,” I mutter under my breath.

“I wouldn’t judge him too harshly,” Eduardo says, surprising me once more. “He has a great deal of responsibility on his hands. Without Alejandro . . .” His voice trails off. “Your father isn’t a young man, and now he has to ensure that when he dies, you, your sisters, and your mother are provided for. Most of the provisions he made for you in Cuba are probably gone. That must worry him.”

And there it is: perhaps more than any of us, Eduardo is the ultimate intersection of the pragmatist and the dreamer.

“You’re angry,” he adds, surprising me yet again. He sees far more than I realize.

There’s no point in denying it. Anger is my faithful companion.

“I’d hoped working with the CIA would help you,” he says. “That it would make the anger more bearable somewhat, at least as it has done for me.”

I always assumed Eduardo involved me because he knew I would be amenable to it and because my beauty and notoriety gave him a weapon he could use against Fidel. I never considered he was helping me, too.

Was that why he took me with him the night he picked up the dynamite? Did he notice how lost I felt in that ballroom after my dance ended with Nick? Or did he really just use me as a diversion to suit his own ends?

“It has helped a bit, I suppose,” I answer. “Have you heard anything from Mr. Dwyer? Anything about Cuba?”

“There are rumors,” Eduardo answers after a beat. “But one struggles with what to believe these days. With the explosion of La Coubre, they say Fidel is growing more paranoid. He’s convinced the CIA is acting against him.”

In early March, La Coubre, a French freighter loaded with weapons headed for Fidel, exploded in the Havana harbor. Many were killed, more injured. Fidel has proclaimed it an act of sabotage by the Americans, another grievance in a growing list of them.

“Were they responsible for the explosion?” It seems entirely plausible they would be, and at the same time, I am predisposed to disbelieve any words that fall from Fidel’s lips.

Eduardo shrugs. “My contacts say ‘no,’ but who really knows with the CIA? I’m not privy to all of their schemes. I’m useful to them in my own way, but unfortunately, not powerful enough to be treated as an equal.”

“What wonderful friends we’ve acquired.”

“At the moment, they’re the only friends who will have us.”

“Perhaps we’re foolish to put all of our faith in the Americans. There have to be others.”

“Who else? The situation grows more complicated with each day. Now the Soviet Union is involved, and they’re growing closer to Fidel; we’re caught between two giants. There’s increased concern about the ramifications intervening in Cuba will have on the tension between the Americans and the Soviets. It’s a mess.”

And even more, for Cubans it is an ongoing source of frustration and pain. Empires in one fashion or another have decided our history: first the Spanish, then the Americans, now Cuba lies in the balance of a proxy war between two powers.

“Do you think this plan will actually come to fruition? That they’ll really have some use for me?”

“The CIA?”

I nod.