Boarding Pass

Priya Sharma had a dress that cost more than her rent, and she had not paid for it, and she was about to wear it onto a yacht to lie to a room full of people who would have her removed from the harbour if they knew who she was. She stood on the dock in the gold Monaco evening and reminded herself that this was, technically, journalism. The assignment had come from her editor with the particular brightness editors used when they were sending you somewhere expensive on no budget. A profile of Laurent Aubrey — financier, philanthropist, host of the most exclusive week on the Riviera calendar — and a quieter, second assignment underneath it, the one that wasn't in the commissioning email and had been delivered instead in a low voice over coffee. Aubrey's charitable foundation had a hole in it. Money had gone somewhere it should not have gone. Nobody could prove anything, because nobody got close enough to Laurent Aubrey to prove anything; he conducted his life behind a wall of yachts and lawyers and invitation-only weeks. Except that Priya had a friend, who had a friend, who had a spare place on the guest list — and a guest, unlike a journalist, walked straight through the wall. So she was Priya Sharma, guest. Not Priya Sharma, travel journalist with a recording app and a list of questions about a foundation. For seven nights she was simply a charming woman in a borrowed dress who had been invited, like everyone else, to drink Aubrey's champagne and admire Aubrey's view. She had told herself it was a small lie. Standing on the dock, watching the yacht rise above her like a white cliff, the lie did not feel small. "You're doing the thing," said a voice beside her, "where a person stands at the bottom of a gangway and visibly reconsiders their entire life." Priya turned. The man had come up the dock without her noticing, which was unusual; she noticed people for a living. He was perhaps thirty-five, dark-haired, in a dinner jacket worn with the slight carelessness of someone who owned several. He was not handsome in the polished way the evening seemed to demand. He was handsome in a more inconvenient way — the kind that came with an expression, an actual point of view, a face that was clearly about to say something it found funny. "I'm not reconsidering anything," Priya said. "I'm admiring the boat." "You're admiring the boat the way people admire a tax bill." He smiled. It was a real smile, and it reached his eyes, and Priya filed that away as a complication. "Don't be nervous. It's only a week of very rich people pretending to enjoy each other. The food is good and the conversation is terrible and after the second night you stop being able to tell the difference between the two." He offered his hand. "I'm Theo. I'd ask which of these people you belong to, but you have the look of someone who doesn't belong to anyone, which on this particular dock makes you the only interesting person I've met all evening." Priya shook his hand and gave him the cover, smoothly, the way she had practiced it in the mirror of a hotel bathroom an hour ago — a guest, a friend of a friend, here for the week, no, she'd never been before. "Theo," she said. "And which of these people do you belong to?" Something flickered behind the smile. Amusement, mostly. A little something else. "Ah," he said. "That's the awkward part. The host is my brother. Laurent Aubrey. I'm the Aubrey nobody profiles, because I have no money of my own and no foundation and no interest in either — which means, Priya-who-belongs-to-no-one, that I am the one person on this yacht with absolutely nothing to gain from talking to you." He gestured up the gangway, toward the white cliff, toward the seven nights and the borrowed dress and the assignment under the assignment. "Shall we go and be lied to by beautiful people? You look like you'd be good at spotting it." Priya climbed the gangway beside the brother of the man she had come to investigate, in a dress she could not afford, carrying a name that was not quite hers — and thought that she had been on the yacht for less than a minute and had already met the one passenger who was going to be a genuine problem.