EVENT SUMMARY & YOUR CHOICE:
At the end of Chapter 32, gunfire erupted around the old man's villa in the middle of the night. A stray bullet loosened the lock on Maya's door, and she had mere seconds to decide between escaping alone through the servants' stairwell, or hiding with Mark and waiting to see who came through the door.
You chose [BRANCH 1]: Leave Mark behind and use the chaos to escape alone through the servants' stairwell, believing his father has come to take him back.
Maya stood up.
She did not look at Mark. She could not. She pressed her lips to the top of his head instead, hard, once, and the smell of him, soap and warm skin and the faint rubbery sweetness of the cotton bunny he slept with, went into her like a knife.
"Stay here," she whispered. "Don't open the door for anyone but your daddy. Do you understand? Only your daddy."
Mark said nothing. His grey eyes shone in the dark, wide and dry.
"I'm going to get help," Maya said. It was the worst lie she had ever told. "I'll be right back."
"Okay," said Mark, in a very small, very polite voice, the voice he used for thank you, Grandfather.
She slipped out.
The corridor was a tunnel of smoke. Something burned at the far end, its glow throwing long, dancing shadows across the paneling, and the portraits on the walls leered and flickered with it. She ran in a crouch, bare feet silent on the carpet, twenty-two paces to the stair, exactly as she'd counted. A body lay against the wall at the fifth pace, a man in a leather jacket with his rifle still in his hand and his mouth open in surprise. She did not look at his face. She stepped over him and kept running.
Forty steps down in the dark. A smell of old cabbage and woodsmoke. A kitchen, a long cold room full of hanging copper pots, where she upset a basin and froze for three breaths, hearing nothing. The scullery door stuck, and she threw her shoulder against it, and it gave with a groan.
Rain hit her face like a slap.
The vegetable garden was a black square of mud and cabbages, hemmed in by a wall as tall as a man. Behind her, the villa spat flames from its upper windows. Orange tongues licked out of the east wing and lit the churning rain from within, and in the bright light of the fire she saw, across the whole length of that sprawling stone ruin, the exact window where a little boy was hiding.
Her feet stopped.
Mark's window.
Fire licked the edge of the shutters.
Her hand flew to her mouth. For one second the whole world narrowed to that square of orange glass. She started toward the house without deciding to. Then a figure ran across the courtyard below the window, a man in black, rifle raised, and she could not tell whose man he was. A second explosion shook the villa, and a section of the roof slid sideways in a shower of slate.
Travis is here. Travis is here. He'll find him. He'll find him. He is his FATHER.
She said it again and again as she ran. She did not stop. She was almost at the broken place in the wall when the sob finally tore out of her, and she had to press her fist against her mouth and bite down until she tasted blood.
She went over the wall.
…
Nobody tells you how long it takes to walk home.
She walked until dawn, along a gravel service road and then a county highway, in torn pajamas and a stranger's coat she'd found hanging over the garden wall. Trucks went by. A trucker slowed, called out something, and sped away when she did not answer. At six o'clock, an old woman with a pickup truck full of cabbages took her as far as the edge of the city without asking a single question, and pressed a five-dollar bill into her hand at the end.
Maya let herself into her rented room with the spare key hidden under the loose brick.
Everything was exactly where she'd left it.
The mug beside the gas stove. The calendar on the wall. The crooked lamp. The old Dell laptop, grey with dust. A dying plant on the sill that she had been meaning to water since the day of the late bus, when her whole life had still been small.
She stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time. Then she walked to the bathroom, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, and stood under it in her clothes until the water ran clear.
She washed the mud from her hair. She scrubbed the smoke from her skin. She put on her softest sweatshirt. She sat down on the edge of her bed with a towel around her shoulders, and she stared out of the window at the rooftops across the alley, wet and grey and ordinary, and did not tell a soul.
Not Chloe, who texted nine times.
Not the police, who would ask her why.
What would I say? she thought. That I handed a child to a stranger's army and walked out the back door?
That I chose to?
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. She turned it face down.
…
On Monday she went back to work.
St. Jude School rose out of the morning fog, grey and Gothic as ever, its iron gates carved with roses. Parents' cars glided up the drive. A flock of small children in blue blazers marched in pairs toward the front doors, carrying lunch boxes shaped like animals. Nobody looked at her. Nobody knew.
The Purple Sprout classroom was silent.
She stood in the doorway and let her eyes travel round it: the tiny rattan chairs; the shelf of picture books; the rug with its faded constellation of stars; the rain-streaked window where a boy had sat every afternoon, clutching a cotton robot, waiting for a car that was always late.
The little rattan chair was gone from the window.
Someone had stacked it neatly with the others.
"Ms. Maya?" A small voice behind her. A girl with a gap-toothed grin and two uneven pigtails tugged at her skirt. "Ms. Maya, where's Mark? He didn't come to school last week. Is he sick?"
Maya looked down. Her mouth opened, and for a moment nothing came out of it.
"I... I don't know, sweetheart," she said at last. "Maybe he's on a trip."
"Oh." The girl thought about that gravely. "Will he be back before the pumpkin party?"
"I hope so."
She walked the rows of cubbies after the children had gone to circle time. Every child had a little hook with a name card. M-A-R-K, in large green letters, hung at the end of the row, and the hook below it was bare. No robot. No spare uniform. No half-finished drawings. Someone had wiped it clean.
At noon, Principal Evans swept into the classroom in a cloud of perfume, the gold rims of her glasses glinting.
"Ms. Maya. A word."
In the hallway, the older woman did not bother to lower her voice. "I'll be brief. The Mark boy has been withdrawn. His family's lawyers called on Thursday; the arrangements are complete. The matter is closed." Her lip curled. "And since you have been conspicuously absent for four days without so much as a doctor's note..."
"I was ill."
"You were indisposed." The principal's gaze raked her up and down. "I'd advise you to reflect on what an intern's position is worth. Another unexplained absence, Ms. Maya, and you will be replaced."
"Withdrawn," Maya said. "Withdrawn where?"
"That," said the principal, "is none of your concern." She turned on her heel and clicked away down the marble.
Maya stood in the corridor and listened to the sound until it faded.
None of my concern.
She returned to the classroom and sat down on the little carpet, among the picture books and the wooden blocks, in the middle of the stars. The light came slanting through the window. A child laughed somewhere in the building.
He's with his father now, she told herself. He is safe. He is safe. He is safe.
She said it until it stopped meaning anything.
