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Lila found Diego so insufferable she cried in 1989 in the middle of a cobblestone street somewhere in Berlin. She’d never been to Berlin before. Not in her—twenty some odd? Was she thirty? But she spent her life hopping from one point in time to another, and after a while, age stopped mattering. She lost track sometime after nineteen when everything went to mush.
But there she was, some unknown age in an unfamiliar place, her eyes leaking with the stolen briefcase clutched in a fist, and Lila couldn’t help but remember that first day she saw him.
He was—in no uncertain terms, in every sense of the fucking matter—her mark. But Lila never was good at following rules, and Diego didn’t seem to care that he was meant to be her target.
Sure at the beginning she merely fancied him a bit. He was nice to look at, and matched her remarks with some type of naturally inclined ease, and he’d go grumpy in the mornings, and the afternoons, and the evenings, and it was undeniably adorable. But then Diego had this cute way of being an absolute imbecile and something about the way he looked at her—like he cared about her, and what she said, and that she existed… Lila hadn’t seen that before, not even in her mother’s eyes. The thought had her bent over the toilet vomiting at the asylum on several occasions. And once in her mother’s hotel room.
But then came the first day at Elliot’s, watching him watch the Frankel footage propped up on the kitchen counter with his head tipped back. And Lila tried to distract herself. She did. She painted Elliot’s toenails and counted the floor tiles and Diego sat there in her peripheral and Lila’s head spun.
So she left for the darkroom. Or was it a closet? She wasn’t quite sure. All Lila knew was if she fucked this up, her mother would have her head. Okay, that was putting it a bit over dramatically. But if Lila fucked this up, she’d probably give her mother her head.
And then Diego came in and the moment he started talking, Lila knew if her mother saw her there, she would’ve been pulled from the mission that very moment. He sat up beneath the shelf of photographs in shoeboxes and put his hand on her knee and started talking about how the world doesn’t make sense. Lila tried to deflect—she did. She went off about how she failed remedial school, and didn’t understand yogurt, and Diego—the fucker—wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb and Lila knew she was ruined. The mission was compromised the moment they met. But that day, Lila knew there was no going back.
So she told him the truth—or as much of it as she could. She told him about her birth parents, about how she hated everyone, but didn’t seem to hate him. And she couldn’t tell him about her mother. Not yet. But Lila would figure that out later. She wasn’t ready to lose Diego, and certainly wasn’t ready to admit to her mum she’d spoiled her assignment like year old milk left out in the sun. But then she’d slip back to the moment, and Diego would turn that milk into honey with every word and every glance and god—Lila would lay in bed for the rest of her life just watching him breathe if she could.