The doctor was a brisk grey-haired woman named Dr. Okafor, and she examined all three of them in the castle's medical wing with the cheerful ferocity of someone who has never once been intimidated by a billionaire.
"Mr. Travis, you're bleeding on my floor. Sit. Ms. Maya, that lip is going to need a stitch, so hold still. And young man..." She crouched in front of Mark with a lollipop in her hand. "Open wide and say ahh, and I'll tell you whether you're going to live."
Mark said ahh. He did not smile. He sat on the edge of the exam table in a clean pair of pajamas with his hands clasped tightly in his lap, and he watched everything: the stethoscope, the thermometer, the stitching of Maya's lip, his father's shoulder wound being cleaned and bandaged. When the doctor pronounced him in perfect health, he nodded politely and said, "Thank you, Doctor," exactly the way he said it to his grandfather.
Maya's heart twisted.
When it was over, a housekeeper led her upstairs, through corridors of dark wood and thick carpet, to a door at the end of the east wing.
"Your room, miss."
It was enormous. A bed with a pale blue coverlet. A marble fireplace. Long windows looking onto a garden of dark roses silvered with dew. A vase of fresh peonies on the dresser. Her old canvas bag sat on the chair, with her sweater folded neatly beside it. Someone must have gone to her apartment and brought her things.
She turned. "Is there a key?"
The housekeeper blinked. "A key, miss?"
"For the door."
"It's on the inside." The woman pointed to the brass key sitting in the lock on the room side. "Mr. Travis said you were to have the only one."
Maya stared at it for a long moment.
On the bedside table, beside a glass of water, lay her phone. Charged. Intact. Not a scratch on it. The screen lit up as she touched it: four hundred messages, a hundred missed calls, every one of them from Chloe.
I'm alive, she typed, with shaking thumbs. I'm safe. I'll call you tomorrow. I love you.
She sat down on the edge of the bed and pressed her hand to her mouth, and for the first time in many days, she let herself shake.
…
She woke to the smell of toast.
For a moment she lay still, listening. The sun was high. Birds argued in the roses. Somewhere, down in the depths of the castle, something clattered, a pan, a spoon, and then a high clear bark of laughter that went straight through her like a bell.
Mark.
She was out of bed and into a robe before she'd finished the thought.
The kitchen was on the ground floor at the back of the east wing, a great stone-floored room with a vaulted ceiling and a range the size of a small car. Copper pots hung in rows. The cook, a round, flour-dusted woman of fifty named Mrs. Alvarez, stood by the counter with her arms folded, wearing the expression of a general whose army has been mutinied.
Mark was sitting in the middle of the table.
He was covered in flour from his hair to his toes, with a wooden spoon in one fist and a bowl in his lap. He looked up as she came in, and his face split into the widest smile she had ever seen on it.
"Ms. Maya! I'm making pancakes!"
"I can see that."
"They're not working."
"Hm." She crossed the room and peered into the bowl. A pale, lumpy, glue-like substance stared back. "What went in there?"
"Flour. And eggs. And all the sugar."
"All of it?"
"There was a jar." Mark looked guilty. "I thought it was a lot of pancakes."
Behind her, Mrs. Alvarez made a strangled sound. Maya bit her lip very hard.
"Well," she said gravely, rolling up her sleeves, "this is a serious situation, and it needs a professional. Mark, you are officially my assistant. Wash your hands. We're going to rescue those pancakes."
They rescued them, more or less. Maya had never been a gifted cook. Her whole life she had survived on instant noodles and sandwiches, and the pancakes that came off the griddle looked like the ruins of an ancient civilization. Mark loved them anyway. He built a tower of four on his plate, drizzled it with enough maple syrup to drown a small animal, and announced that they were the best pancakes in the entire history of the world.
"Even better than Mrs. Alvarez's?"
Mrs. Alvarez, who had been pretending to wash a pot, turned and put a hand on her heart.
"I will allow it," she said, "because I like your face."
And Maya laughed.
It surprised her. It came up from somewhere deep, a full, helpless, breathless laugh, and it went on and on, and when it was over her eyes were wet and her ribs ached, and Mark was staring at her with the awed expression of a child who has seen a rare bird.
"You laugh like a bell," he said.
"So do you."
"Do not."
"Do too."
She told him stories while they ate. She told him about the time a four-year-old in her very first class had glued his own eyebrows to a sheet of construction paper and refused to let anyone peel them off, because "it's art." She told him about the parent-teacher evening when a very important businessman had burst into tears over a macaroni portrait of himself, and had to be consoled with juice. She told him about the day the whole class had decided to give the classroom hamster a funeral, with a procession, a eulogy, and a twenty-minute dirge on kazoos, only to discover, at the graveside, that the hamster was merely asleep.
"He sat up in the shoebox and looked at us," Maya said, widening her eyes. "Like this. Very annoyed."
Mark shrieked so hard he fell off his chair.
…
He was standing in the doorway.
She didn't know how long. She turned with the syrup bottle in her hand and Mark clambering back onto the table, and there was Travis, leaning against the frame with one shoulder, his arm in a sling, his shirt open at the collar. He wore no tie. His hair was damp from the shower. There was no mask on his face, no cold lines, no distance. He was simply watching them: the two of them, the flour, the syrup, the ruined pancakes.
He was smiling.
It was a small smile, crooked and tired. It reached his eyes, and when it did, his whole face changed. Years fell away from it. He looked, for a moment, like a man she might have known in another life, in a bakery on some bright morning.
"Dad!" Mark waved a pancake. "We made breakfast! Come see! Ms. Maya says we can do it again tomorrow!"
"Did she," said Travis.
"I said maybe," Maya said.
"Maybe is a yes, in my son's language." He crossed the stone floor, ducked under a hanging pot, and sat down at the end of the table with the air of a man who has not sat at a kitchen table in years. Mrs. Alvarez, with a look of enormous significance, placed a plate before him. He studied it.
"What is this?"
"A pancake," said Mark.
"It looks like a map of Greenland."
"It's delicious."
Travis took a bite. He chewed for a very long moment. Something unreadable passed over his face.
"It's very sweet," he said.
"I put all the sugar!"
"Evidently."
Maya pressed her hand to her mouth. Mrs. Alvarez had turned away to the sink, her shoulders suspiciously unsteady. Mark looked from one adult to the other, puzzled and delighted, and then, to everyone's astonishment, the Chairman of the Travis family took another bite, and another, and finished the whole stack.
…
It was in the afternoon, out in the garden, that the question came.
They'd been drawing in chalk on the flagstones, a lopsided castle, a sun, three stick-figures with big hands. Mark had gone quiet. He sat back on his heels with the chalk in his fist and stared at his picture for a long time.
"Ms. Maya?"
"Yes, sweetheart?"
"Is Grandfather hurt?"
She felt, rather than saw, Travis stiffen on the bench behind them.
She set down her chalk. She took her time.
"I don't know, Mark," she said gently. "I hope not."
"He had a lot of guns in his house." Mark's brow furrowed. "And he did bad things. I know that. I heard. But he gave me a train. And he never yelled." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Is it bad that I'm worried about him?"
Maya looked at his small serious face, with its smears of chalk dust and its terribly grown-up eyes, and her heart ached so hard she could scarcely breathe.
"No," she said. "It isn't bad. You can care about someone even if they did wrong things. That doesn't make you wrong. It just makes you kind."
"Then I'm not a bad boy?"
"You are the farthest thing from a bad boy I have ever met."
Mark leaned against her side. She slid her arm around him. And over his head she saw Travis, still on the bench, with a face like carved stone, staring at the garden wall with a hand clenched in his lap, and she understood that the boy had just been torn in half down the middle: between the father who had been absent and the grandfather who had been dangerous, between a love he didn't understand and a fear he couldn't name.
Something swelled in her chest, fierce and protective and strange.
It came over her all at once, sitting there on the warm flagstones with chalk on her hands. She had known the boy for months. She had made him toys at night and wiped his tears and taught him to fold paper boats. But she hadn't known, until this moment, how very much she loved him.
Not as a student.
Not as a child she had a duty to.
As mine.
The thought arrived with no warning, and she did not push it away.
I would walk back into that burning house for him again. Without thinking. Without a second's pause.
"Ms. Maya?" Mark looked up. "You're crying."
"It's the chalk dust," she said, wiping her eyes. "It makes my nose tickle."
"Liar," said Mark kindly, and leaned his head on her shoulder.
