Dwyer smiles, the effort unnatural on a face that looks as though it has little use for charming lines creeping in the creases and folds of his skin.

“I can do inscrutable with the best of them, Miss Perez, but you requested this meeting, so if you’re going to convince me this is worth my time, you’d better start now.”

In Cuba, people are suffering, dying, while here stands a man in a tuxedo idly plotting a coup between drags of his cigarette. That he’s likely enjoying it adds insult to injury.

“You wouldn’t be meeting with me if you weren’t a little desperate.” My confidence grows a bit with each word falling from my lips. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t looking for creative ways to get close to Fidel,” I add. “If he hadn’t rebuffed any and all diplomatic overtures you’ve already made. I’m the one risking everything—my reputation, my family’s, my life—so please explain to me how I need you more than you need me. I could easily find a rich man to slide a ring on my finger and buy me a big mansion while the world around me burns, but you’re the one with communism breathing down your neck, whose head will roll if Latin America falls. You have a potential powder keg sitting ninety miles away from America’s shores. You need Cuba. And you need me. Let’s not insult each other’s intelligence by pretending otherwise.”

He inclines his head in a mock salute amid a cloud of smoke. “Eduardo said you were more than just another pretty face.”

Eduardo Diaz, the son of one of my father’s friends, is the man who orchestrated this little meeting, one of the many who have helped my family acclimate to life in the United States.

Dwyer takes another drag on his cigarette. “Would you like to start over, then? Why do you think you can get close to Castro?”

“Because he is a man.”

Is there really need to say more? You don’t garner five marriage proposals without learning a thing or two about the management of men.

“Have you met him before? Has he proposed to you, too?”

It seems my reputation once again precedes itself.

“No, he’s never had the pleasure. I’ve met Guevara a handful of times, though.”

“And Guevara trusts you?”

I allow myself one very unladylike snort. “Hardly. I doubt he very much cares one way or the other, but isn’t that the point? I’m the girl they know from the society pages. One of the infamous sugar queens they so despise yet cannot resist. No one considers me a threat, and given the size of their egos, their dislike of my family, and the cachet of my last name, the idea of sticking it to my father will be eminently persuasive. Besides . . .”

My voice trails off, but I don’t need to finish the thought. Revolutionaries, tyrants, it doesn’t matter. They are, at their hearts, men, driven by things other than their intellect.

Dwyer’s gaze rakes over my appearance once more, examining the curves on display, taking in the signs that my circumstances have been reduced: the dress a blush removed from fashion, the ill-fitting shoes, the garish glint of the necklace around my neck.

For all my posturing, I need this, too, and he knows it.

“So how do you propose to get to him? In Cuba?”

He dangles it in front of me like a treat before a child. What wouldn’t I give to return home to the only place I have ever felt as though I belonged? To return to my friends, my extended family, my people, to stop this endless waiting?

“Perhaps,” I answer. “Or when he comes to the United States for a diplomatic visit.”

Castro was invited to the United States last April, three months after he took power. To his credit, President Eisenhower didn’t receive him, but Fidel did meet with Vice President Nixon. Judging by the man standing before me, their meeting did not go well.

“Castro isn’t a reckless man. Not with his life, at least. It won’t be easy to get close to him, even with your considerable charms,” Dwyer cautions.

“I don’t need it to be easy. I only need a chance.”

“And if you don’t succeed? If his guards stop you, they could kill you. They likely will. There are some places where your last name isn’t going to protect you. Are you prepared for that?”

“If I don’t succeed, then they kill me. I assure you, I’m aware of the stakes. I wouldn’t volunteer for this if I wasn’t.”

“Didn’t take you for an idealist.”

He says “idealist” like it’s a vulgar word.

“I’m not one.”

“Your brother—”

“I don’t talk about my brother. You don’t get that.”

Alejandro was the first to speak out when he began to see the cracks in the life we lived in Cuba before the revolution. His outrage over our family’s wealth and position in contrast to the suffering of those around us spilled out at the dinner table. Eventually, he joined the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, one of the student groups organizing at the University of Havana, and became involved with the resistance to then Cuban president Fulgencio Batista, participating in an attack on the Presidential Palace that ultimately led to our father disowning him. While most viewed Batista through a negative lens, our father chose friendship as a necessarily evil.

As with everything in our lives, where Alejandro went, I followed, until his anger became my anger, his dreams my dreams, his hope my hope, his death my death.

We left my brother behind in Cuba, buried in a mausoleum with countless other family members, his body interred beneath the same soil his killers now control.

I take a deep breath. “Are you interested in my help or not?”

Dwyer snubs the cigarette out on the ground with the toe of his evening shoe. “Possibly. We’ll be in contact.”

He’s gone with a clipped nod, leaving me alone on the balcony, torn between hope and despair.

It’s just me, Isabel, and Maria at the house with our parents now that Elisa has married. Maria spends her days in school while Isabel and I struggle to occupy our time. We volunteer with charities, the church, and then, of course, I have my political extracurricular activities. Still, it feels so aimless. I’ve resurrected the argument to allow us to attend university, asked to help out with the sugar company our father is resuscitating from its near demise thanks to Fidel’s revolution.

Eight months ago, the regime passed the agrarian reform law, limiting the amount of privately owned land, redistributing the remainder or seizing it for government use. With a stroke of a pen, everything my family and others like us had built for centuries simply vanished. The rumors coming out of our country are harbingers of far worse. Thousands of my countrymen have been tortured, imprisoned, murdered.

“You should be careful.”

The voice jolts me, and I pivot slowly, prolonging the moment a bit for female vanity, but mostly to clear my head.

He’s no less golden now that I know who he is, or now that he’s officially engaged. In fact, the only thing marring his handsome face is the scowl directed at me.

“Dwyer is not someone you want to get on the wrong side of,” Nicholas Preston warns.

Given his influential position in the government, I’m not surprised he’s familiar with a CIA official; from the interest I saw in his gaze, I’m not surprised he tracked my departure from the ballroom in the midst of his engagement announcement, either.

I bristle at the words, though, at the warning contained in his tone, at the implication that I need a keeper.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Maybe you can, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be more careful about the company you keep. Dwyer won’t feel guilty about using you in order to achieve his ends, and he won’t concern himself overmuch with what happens to you in the process. He doesn’t play around.”

“Good, because I don’t play around, either.”

His words feel a lot like all the ones my parents put before me, the barriers and obstacles—my gender, our family’s status, the need to marry a man who reflects well on my family, the importance of always advancing our position in the world.

He steps forward, and I tilt my head to the side, studying him.

“Should you be out here, Senator Preston? I can’t imagine your fiancée would be pleased to see you so concerned with another woman’s affairs. Especially someone like me.”

In this sedate little town, this insular island, I am a scandal.

A tic in his jaw erupts as the word “fiancée” falls from my lips. A full-body flinch at “affairs.”

I smile, all teeth this time. “Like I said, I can take care of myself.”

He doesn’t speak, the silence yawning between us, and then he nods, the motion stiff, the familiarity that existed between us earlier on the balcony erased.

“Of course you can. I apologize for intruding.” There’s a hint of mockery in his tone and in the curve of his lips that suggests he bites, too. “As you said, my fiancée is waiting for me.”