The problem, Annie thinks to herself as her Sri Lankan bus bumps over the potholes in the road from Bandaranaike International Airport, is that she will always be a spy. Maybe even before being a sister, a friend, a lover, she is a spy. And because she is a spy, she knows how to find people who don't want to be found.
She replies to the text from the Langley number with "Coordinates?" Instead of receiving the actual coordinates of Auggie's last known location, she receives "colombo sry."
That's the best she has to go off of. A city with a population of 5.6 million people plus millions of tourists fluttering in and out of the city for the beautiful beaches and cheap resorts.
Good thing she is a spy.
And even better that Annie can think like Auggie would think. He loves the beach, even before he went blind, he had always loved the beach. To make it easy on Natasha, he would want their hotel within walking distance of the beach. A place with wifi for both of them. He has more than enough money to afford a decent hotel, so hostels and motels are out of the question.
Before long, Annie has a feasible list of hotels, and even with hotels' privacy policies, Sri Lanka is reliable on the bribery of their people for information. She would be able to find out the hotel room number of a blind American for under $5.
And she does.
The Ozo Colombo Hotel, Room 1220.
Annie books a hotel room on the same floor under a fake name and pays in cash, claiming that her credit card was stolen at the airport. The rooms are pristine and the sound of the ocean is soothing enough to almost lull her to sleep, despite her mostly self-appointed mission to find out what the fuck is going on with Auggie.
Instead, she changes into a breezy skirt and tank top then steps barefoot out of her room. She waits for a few minutes in the hallway outside Auggie's until she sees a maid, and explains with her limited knowledge of Sinhalese that she's so embarrassed but in her excitement to take a picture of the extravagant hotel lobby, she locked herself out of her room. The maid laughs and pats Annie on the shoulder, sufficed with Annie's pretend chagrined look.
That's all it takes for the maid to swipe her keycard into Auggie's door, almost too easy. Annie nods her thanks before carefully stepping foot into the hotel suite that has been Auggie's primary residence for nearly three weeks.
To say that she is shocked would be one hell of an understatement.
Clothes are strewn about the main room, across couches and chairs, the small dining table, the floor. To-go containers and room service trays cover every other available surface, food in various stages of spoiling.
What surprises her most are the bottles of alcohol littering the floor. All empty. All whiskey. Annie can't even remember a time that she had seen Auggie drinking whiskey, but that seems to be his drink of choice now.
Silent in her entrance, she moves further toward the separate bedroom, door slightly ajar. It takes all of her training not to run straight into the room when she sees Auggie on the bed. Instead, she takes it all in, analyzing everything in the way that her instinctual training forces her to. Auggie is sprawled diagonally across the queen sized bed, clad only a pair of boxers with the hotel's thick white comforter strewn mostly across the floor.
Annie pads over to the bottom of the bed but doesn't move to sit down. She fights the urge to run her fingers through Auggie's tangled dark curls that have grown far longer than she's ever seen, but she keeps her hands by her side.
Clearing her throat and hoping that will wake him, Annie suddenly realizes something. She has no fucking clue what she's supposed to do from here. There haven't been many times in Annie Walker's life where she isn't sure of what she's doing, even if the plan is to just go with the flow. She truly and wholeheartedly does not know how she's supposed to handle being with Auggie again.
Auggie barely stirs, and it's a testament to how drunk he is and has been that all of his training didn't wake him when Annie opened the front door of his room. She knows better than to reach out and touch him, but she does move closer.
"Auggie, it's me," Annie says, her voice stronger and more solid than she actually feels. Everything she expected is suddenly ridiculous, naive, childish even. She doesn't expect him to be completely fine, given how he seems to have dropped off the grid entirely, even to Langley. She doesn't expect Auggie to want to go out for drinks and catch up. No, she doesn't expect to be welcomed with open arms and a hug upon seeing him.
It's as if she is having an out of body experience. She doesn't expect to be flipped on her back with Auggie's forearm cutting off the oxygen to her lungs either.