The days went on, because days do.
Maya taught the letters of the alphabet. She taught the colors of the rainbow and the names of the seasons and the song about the five little ducks. She wiped runny noses and tied small shoes and kissed scraped knees, and in the evenings she went home and ate instant noodles standing up at the counter, and tried not to look at the phone.
She did not hear from the old man. She did not hear from the villa. The silence from the hills was total, as if the whole thing had been swallowed back into the dark.
And she did not hear from Travis.
On the ninth day she stayed after the bell.
The classroom was golden with late sun. Dust motes turned in the slanting light. She took a wooden crate from under the supply cabinet and began, slowly, to put away the toys that nobody would play with anymore: the handmade cotton robots with their press-stud hands, the small rubber bear, the building blocks stacked into a tower that only Mark ever built, tall and straight and perfectly balanced.
She held each one a moment before laying it in the crate.
"Excuse me." A voice at the door, brittle and amused. "Is the intern crying into the building blocks again?"
Maya did not turn. Ms. Beatrice's heels clicked closer.
"I told you, dear. You mustn't get attached. They come, they go. That's the nature of a school like this. Today he's the little prince of the Purple Sprout, tomorrow he's in Switzerland with a nanny. And you are a temp." She sniffed. "I did say, didn't I? Don't try to climb the ladder on someone else's child."
"I wasn't climbing anything."
"Of course you weren't." The heels clicked away. A girl's laughter drifted in from the corridor, low and spiteful. "Poor thing. She really thought she was his mother."
Maya closed the lid of the crate very, very gently.
A small tug came at her sleeve.
It was the girl with the uneven pigtails, standing in the doorway with her backpack on both shoulders and her lunchbox hanging from one wrist. Her face was solemn.
"Ms. Maya?"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"I found this." She held out a piece of paper, creased and soft, as though it had been folded and unfolded many times. "It was in the back of Mark's cubby. Behind the hook. I wasn't snooping. It fell out when the cleaning lady moved the box. It has your name on it."
Maya's fingers closed around it.
It was a sheet of cheap white drawing paper, torn along one edge, with a smear of crayon across the corner. In the middle, in the careful, wobbling hand of a child who had only just learned his letters, were five words.
Ms. Maya, you are my mom.
And beneath it, a drawing of two stick figures hand in hand under a lopsided yellow sun.
She did not realize she was making a sound until the girl's small hand patted her knee.
"Don't cry, Ms. Maya. Don't cry." The girl sounded worried. "Mark didn't mean to make you sad. He made it for a happy time."
"I know," Maya choked. "I know he did."
She sat on the floor of the empty classroom with the drawing pressed against her chest, and the girl sat down beside her and said nothing at all, and the sun went on turning orange in the window.
…
She stayed at school until the building was dark.
When she finally went out, the sky had turned to wet grey ink. A thin cold drizzle hung in the air, too light to be rain and too heavy to be mist. She walked home with her collar up and her hands in her pockets and the folded drawing pressed against her ribs, past shuttered shopfronts and shining pavements and a sad little bus shelter in which an old man slept upright over a newspaper.
Her building stood at the end of the lane, narrow and sagging, its stairwell light flickering.
She was fumbling for her key when she noticed the shape under the lamppost.
A man stood in the rain, quite still.
He wore no coat. His black shirt had been soaked through so long that it clung to every line of his shoulders. His hair was plastered flat to his forehead, and rainwater ran down his jaw, off his chin, onto the pavement. He was looking at her building. Then, as she stopped on the bottom step, he was looking at her.
Thud.
Her heart gave one great, painful leap.
"Travis?"
He said nothing.
He walked toward her, slowly, as if the pavement were unsteady beneath his shoes, and stopped three paces away, in the cone of the broken stairwell light. The rain was in his eyelashes. His eyes were red. They were the color of an old wound, bloodshot, exhausted, and under that red, the ash-grey was almost black.
He looked like he hadn't slept in a week.
"Mr. Travis," Maya said, hoarse. "Is Mark—"
"He's alive."
The two words came out of him strangely, as though he had to climb them. Her knees nearly gave way. She had to grip the railing.
"He's alive," Travis repeated. "He's with me. He's home. He's safe."
"Thank God." She laughed, a broken, wet, incredulous sound. "Thank God, thank God. I was so afraid. I left him. I'm so sorry, Mr. Travis, I know I should never have—"
"Don't."
She stopped.
He had not moved. His hands hung at his sides, opening and closing. The rain beat down on his shoulders and he didn't seem to feel it. In all the times she'd seen him, in the classroom, in the corridor, in the dim light of the school courtyard, with his perfect charcoal suits and his measured voice, she had never seen his face do what it was doing now. It was coming apart. Slowly, silently, like ice on a river in March.
"Be my mistress," he said.
Maya stared at him.
The rain filled the silence.
"I'm sorry?"
"Be mine." His voice was raw. "Not the school's, not the kid's. Mine. I'll give you a house. An apartment, whatever you want, wherever you want it. Money. Whatever is mine is yours, except..." His throat worked. "Except a name. I can't give you a name. But I can give you everything else. Only say yes."
"Mr. Travis—"
"I'm not asking you to understand." He took a step toward her. The stairwell light flickered across his face. "I'm asking you to say yes."
For a long moment she could not make her lips move. Her mind simply refused to accept the picture in front of her. This was the man who hadn't looked at her once in the weeks of the late pickups. The man who had vanished from her life like a ghost after one rainy afternoon, who hadn't answered a single message, who had sent strangers in his place to watch over his son.
Who had left her alone.
"You vanished," she heard herself whisper. "You didn't answer. For weeks. Mark kept waiting. I kept waiting. And now you stand in the rain and ask me to be your—"
"I know."
"You don't know." Her voice shook, then steadied, hardened. "You don't know anything about me. You think because you're rich you can come to my door and buy a woman by the night? I am a teacher. I am a person. I'm not for sale, Mr. Travis. Not for money. Not for a house."
His face flinched, as though she had slapped him.
"I won't be anyone's mistress," Maya said. "Go home to your son."
Silence.
Then the great, frightening man in the black shirt covered his face with both hands, and his shoulders began to shake.
She had never seen a man cry like that. Without sound, without dignity, leaning against the lamppost as if it were the only solid thing left in the world. His fingers dug into his own hair. A low, ragged noise, half breath, half sob, tore out of him, and the rain washed it down the gutter.
"I'm sorry," he said, and she heard that he was not talking about the question. "God. I'm so sorry."
"Travis—"
He dropped his hands and looked at her one more time. In the broken light, with the water pouring down his face, she could not tell the rain from the tears.
Then he turned and walked into the dark.
She stood on the bottom step with her key forgotten in her hand and watched his figure dissolve into the drizzle, until there was nothing at the end of the street but the shining road and the hiss of the wind.
What just happened?
She did not know.
But as she climbed the stairs, with the crumpled drawing pressed against her heart and the rain dripping from her sleeves, a thought came to her, small and cold and quiet. It had not been the face of a man who wanted something.
It had been the face of a man saying goodbye.
