Cixi should have focused on what Olga had just said. The sentence sat between them like a key on the low table, waiting to be picked up and turned in a lock, and Cixi was the woman who had been asked to pick it up.
She did not pick it up.
Her brain, the small treacherous part of it that had decided what the more interesting problem in the room was, had spun off in a different direction entirely. The direction was the man whose silk sheet she had woken up under. It had to have been Cassian. Cassian had been on her phone for twenty minutes before she went out to the terrace. Cassian had been the last person she thought of before the wind found her hair. Cassian had also been in a different building two corridors and one staircase away, and the time it would have taken him to descend three storeys, cross a garden, and put his hands beneath a falling woman was zero, or close enough to zero that her brain refused to accept the maths.
How was that possible?
How had he —
