Flowers arrived the next morning.
A deliveryman in a pressed grey uniform stood in the hall outside her door at seven a.m., holding a vase so enormous he had to turn his body sideways to fit it through the stairwell. Two dozen white roses. A card, creamy and thick, with no message, only a single initial pressed into the paper in black ink.
T.
Maya looked at the roses for a very long time. Then she handed the vase back.
"Please take these away. I don't accept them."
"Ma'am, they're paid for."
"Then you may keep them. Give them to your wife."
By Wednesday it was a hamper of fruit, imported pears and figs in tissue. By Friday it was a box of Belgian chocolates tied with silk ribbon, a pair of black leather gloves, a cashmere scarf the color of mist, an envelope containing a restaurant gift voucher so large that she wondered if it was a mistake. By the following Monday the little corridor outside her apartment was lined with unclaimed parcels, and the neighbor across the hall had begun to look at her with interest.
She returned them all. Each one, by hand, to the courier, with a polite, unwavering refusal.
The messages began that same week.
Are you eating?
It's cold. Take an umbrella.
Mark asked about you today.
That last one, she read three times. She sat on the edge of the bed with the phone trembling in both hands and typed a reply, and deleted it. And typed again, and deleted that, and finally laid the phone facedown on the blanket and pressed her fists to her eyes.
Don't answer him, she told herself. Don't. Not like this. Not when he's so... when he's...
On Friday evening Chloe called, and the second Maya picked up, her friend's voice leaped out of the receiver like a small fierce animal.
"Okay, I'm just going to say it. You are not going back there."
"I never said—"
"You didn't have to say it. I've been your friend since the second week of college, Maya, and I can hear it. You're doing the thing." A rattle of dishes, an angry breath. "You told me everything last weekend. A stranger in a black suit with an eagle card. A rich old man with a house full of rifles who calls himself that little boy's grandfather. You told me you ran. And now the boy's father shows up in the rain, offers you a condo, and sends you roses with no message? What kind of man does that?"
"A man who looked like he was dying, Chloe."
"Of what, guilt? Good. Let him." A pause. Softer: "Honey. You don't owe them anything. Not him, not the kid's family. You did everything a person could do. Let it go."
She said she would. She meant it, at the time.
But each night, in the dark, the thought of the drawing came back. The stick figures. The lopsided sun. Five little words in crayon, in a child's hand, that said you are my mom to a woman who'd run away through a garden in the rain.
…
It was the cotton rabbit that did it.
She had been making it for three nights. She did not tell herself why. She sat on the sofa under the yellow lamp with a needle and a spool of thread and the remnants of an old white blouse, cutting and stitching, stuffing the limbs with soft batting, embroidering two tiny black eyes. When it was done she held it in her palm: a lumpy, imperfect little rabbit, one ear longer than the other, with a grey ribbon around its neck. Mark's favorite color.
She wrapped it in tissue paper, and wrote a note on a lined index card:
For Mark. Be brave. Count your stars. —Ms. Maya
She wrote the castle's address on the parcel. She had not known it, once, but she had looked it up in the staff directory of St. Jude's donor list, under the family name on the school ledgers. It was not hard to find. Powerful people hid their fortunes, but never their street addresses.
She sent it by courier, with a reply fee paid in advance.
Four days later the same parcel came back.
Same tissue paper. Same ribbon. But the card had been slit open and re-sealed, and fastened to it with a paper clip was a small slip of heavy cream paper in a firm, angular hand.
If you wish to see him, come yourself.
She turned the slip over. Nothing on the back. No name.
She turned it over again. She turned it over a third time.
Then she picked up her phone, and, before she could think better of it, typed to the one contact that had been sitting at the top of her inbox for three weeks:
I made something for Mark. I'd like to see him.
The answer arrived in under a minute.
If you want to see Mark, come to me.
Nothing else. No greeting, no kindness. She stared at the sentence until the letters seemed to swim.
Come to me.
Not: come home. Not: come visit. Come to me.
Something crawled down the back of her neck, though she could not have said what. A faint, unplaceable wrongness, like the scent of smoke in a house with no fire. She had known the man for barely a month in all, she'd spoken a few dozen sentences to him in her whole life, and still she knew, as clearly as she knew her own handwriting, that this was not how he would say it.
Chloe came over that night with a bag of takeout noodles and a face like a thundercloud.
"No."
"Chloe—"
"No, no, a thousand times no. It's a trap. It's obviously a trap. It's got trap tattooed on its forehead in letters a foot high." She slapped the bag onto the counter. "Two sentences from the man. If you want to see Mark, come to me. Not one word of hello. Not one word about how his own son is doing. You said he never answered a single message when you were worried sick, and now, the minute you say you want to see a five-year-old, he writes back in sixty seconds?"
"I know how it sounds."
"Then you know why you can't go."
Maya looked down at the rabbit in her lap.
"He's five years old," she said. "Do you know what he said to me, the last night I saw him? He said, 'It's okay if you go. I won't be mad.' He's five, Chloe. Five." Her voice cracked. "I left him. I left him with strangers and walked out the door because I thought it was safe. I need to see his face. I need to know he's alright. Then I'll never ask for anything again."
"And if he isn't?"
"Then I'll know."
For a long time Chloe didn't speak. The noodles went cold on the counter. Outside, the wind rattled the window, and the sound of a distant siren rose and fell and faded.
"Fine," Chloe said at last, heavily. "But you text me. Every hour on the hour. And if you don't answer by midnight, I'm sending the cops and the National Guard and my mother."
"Deal."
"I mean it, Maya."
"I know."
Chloe pulled her into a hard, sudden hug, and for a long time neither of them said a word.
…
On Saturday morning, a car came for her.
A plain black sedan idled at the corner of the street. No plates, no driver's cap. The rear door was held open by a man she had never seen before, grave and silent, with a scar down the side of his neck. He bowed his head very slightly as she approached. He didn't smile.
Maya stood with the cotton rabbit pressed against her chest.
Count your stars, she thought. One. Two.
She got in.
The car slid through the sleeping city and out into the hills, past the last strip malls and gas stations and into the long dark corridor of pines. The sky was low and iron-grey. The road wound and doubled back, and after nearly an hour the trees fell away and revealed, on a distant ridge, a pile of ancient grey stone with towers like the teeth of a comb.
A castle.
It was a great deal larger than she had imagined, and a great deal more silent. A black iron gate swung open before the car. A line of servants stood in the courtyard, perfectly still, like figures in a painting, and not one of them looked at her.
At the top of the steps, framed in the great oak doorway, a tall figure waited in a black suit.
He was standing very straight.
He was smiling.
It was such a small, soft smile, hardly more than a faint curve at the corner of his mouth. But his eyes were red-rimmed and wet, and something in Maya's chest, the part that had lifted at the sight of him, went quiet and very, very still.
Why is he smiling like that?
"Maya," said Travis, and held out his hand. "Come in."
