She woke in the dark to the sound of a voice.
Not a scream. Not even a cry. Something smaller and more dreadful: a man's voice, low and broken, saying the same word over and over through the wall of a sleeping house.
"...no... no... don't... don't take..."
Maya was on her feet before she was fully awake.
The east wing hallway lay shadowed and silent. The voice came from the far end, from a pair of tall double doors that stood slightly open, a thin gold line of lamplight spilling across the floor. She had never been inside. She stood on the threshold with her heart in her throat, and then, because the voice broke on a sound like drowning, she pushed the door open.
The bedroom was dim and austere. A great bed stood in the center with dark sheets knotted around its occupant's legs. The window was open to the night. The curtains swayed in the wind, and on the bedside table the lamp threw a trembling pool of light over a tumbler of water and a folded newspaper.
Travis lay half upright against the headboard with his eyes squeezed shut.
His face was grey, and wet. The white scar of the bullet on his shoulder gleamed under a sheen of sweat. His fists were clenched in the sheets, and his chest heaved as if he'd been running for miles. His lips moved.
"...don't... please don't... it's mine... it's all I've got..."
Maya crossed the room in three steps.
"Travis."
He didn't hear.
"Travis. Wake up. It's me. It's Maya. You're having a dream."
She laid a hand on his arm.
He came awake like a man surfacing from deep water, with a great gasping inhale, eyes flying open, one hand flashing out to seize her wrist. His grip was iron. His eyes were wild, ash-grey and blind and fixed on something she couldn't see. For one terrifying moment he did not know her.
"It's Maya," she said again, and did not pull away. "It's all right. You're home."
The light slowly returned to his eyes. He stared at her. She saw the moment he understood, saw his fingers loosen, saw the iron go out of his shoulders, and then, without a word, he dragged her down into his arms and buried his face in her neck.
He was shaking.
She held him.
She did not ask what he'd dreamed. She did not say it's only a dream, because she had been inside enough nightmares to know that it was never only. She simply wrapped her arms around his broad, hot, trembling back and stroked his hair, slowly, the way she'd stroke a frightened child's, until the shudders began to subside.
"Don't go," he rasped, against her skin. "Please. Don't leave."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"Stay."
"I'm here."
"Just—" His voice cracked. "Just for a minute."
"As long as you need."
…
When he finally spoke, an hour had passed.
They were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed, the lamp turned low, a glass of water between them. He had dragged a robe on. She had pulled a blanket round her shoulders. Neither of them had said anything for a long time, and the silence had been comfortable, strangely, like a warm room.
"I was hungry," Travis said.
She looked at him.
"In the dream. I'm always hungry. I'm nine, ten years old. Eleven. It's winter, and there's ice in the gutter, and I'm standing outside a bakery with my face against the glass. And a man comes out, and he's holding a loaf, and I think, maybe, maybe, maybe, and he throws it in the trash." His mouth twisted. "And then someone is behind me. Someone bigger. They want it too. And I grab it, and I run."
"Oh, Travis."
"I always wake up before I get to eat." He laughed once, a short, ugly sound. "Thirty years old and I still wake up starving."
She did not tell him I'm sorry. She laid her hand over his on the coverlet.
"It was a long time ago," she said.
"It was yesterday."
"I know." She thought of the slum, the cold, the sharp ache of an empty stomach in the middle of the night. A cold pang flickered somewhere in the back of her mind, a flicker of something half-seen, half-remembered, and faded again. "I know."
They looked at each other.
The silence changed.
It was not that anything had moved. It was only that the air in the room grew still and warm and close, and she felt, all at once, how near he was: the heat of his shoulder through the thin cotton of his robe, the shadow of stubble along his jaw, the dark eyes that held her with an expression she did not dare name.
"Maya."
"Yes?"
"Will you walk with me?"
…
The garden was drenched in moonlight.
They went down the back stairs and out through the glass doors, barefoot, the grass cold and wet beneath their feet. The moon hung full and white above the pines. Every rose-leaf wore a coat of silver. The air smelled of earth and night-blooming jasmine, and somewhere in the hedges a cricket was sawing away at its violin.
Neither spoke. They walked along the gravel path with their shoulders almost touching, past the dry fountain, past the old stone cottage at the end of the lawn, to a little bench beneath a trellis of climbing white roses.
Travis stopped.
"I've been wanting to say this for a long time," he said, "and I'm no good at it."
"Then don't say it."
He turned to her.
"What?"
"Don't say it," Maya said, and she heard her voice shake. "Not yet. Not if it's only words." She drew a breath. "I've been surrounded by words for months, Travis. Promises and rules and reasons. I've had enough of them. Just..." Her cheeks burned. "Just show me."
For a long moment he did not move.
Then he took a step.
He lifted his hand and laid it, very gently, against her cheek. His thumb brushed across her cheekbone. His eyes, in the moonlight, were wet, and impossibly gentle, and she stood still as a doe and let him look at her.
"I don't want to be careful with you," he said hoarsely.
"Then don't be."
He kissed her.
It was nothing like she'd imagined. She had thought, in the confused, feverish daydreams she'd refused to acknowledge, that it would be fierce, a storm, a fire. Instead it was slow, and gentle, and almost devastatingly tender, a kiss that asked a question and waited for the answer. His hand slid into her hair. Her fingers curled in his robe. For a long, trembling moment the world narrowed to the warmth of his mouth, the taste of mint and night air, the thud of his heart against hers.
And when she kissed him back, it changed.
Something in him broke open. His arms came round her and hauled her against his chest, and the kiss deepened, hungry and shaking and utterly unguarded, as though he had been starving all his life and had only just learned what food was. She heard a sound come out of her throat. She felt her feet leave the ground, the whole garden spin, and she clung to him, laughing and crying and kissing him back with everything she had.
When they finally broke apart, they were both breathless.
He rested his forehead against hers.
"I thought I'd imagined it," he whispered. "All of it. The way you looked at me."
"You didn't imagine anything."
"I'm not going to stop."
"I'm not asking you to."
He laughed unsteadily, and kissed her again.
…
The weeks that followed were the happiest of her life.
It was a quiet kind of happiness, made of small things. Breakfast at the long table with Mark's elbows in the jam. A stack of papers on Travis's desk that he abandoned the instant she walked in. A note slipped into her coat pocket: Thinking of you in a meeting about shipping tariffs. Send help. Evenings in the library with a fire crackling and Mark asleep across their laps, while Travis read aloud from a book of terrible poetry in a voice so solemn that she laughed until she had to hold her sides.
Mark went back to school.
He walked into the Purple Sprout room one Monday morning in his blue blazer with his lunchbox swinging, flanked by two bodyguards disguised as chauffeurs, and was nearly knocked over by a dozen small children shrieking his name. Principal Evans, who had been spoiling for a fight with Maya for weeks, took one look at the new endowment letter on her desk and welcomed them both with a smile like a wolf's. Ms. Beatrice dropped a tray.
And in the evenings, Travis came home on time.
Always on time. At six o'clock exactly, the sound of the car on the gravel drive, the heavy front door, his voice calling up the stairs: Where's my family? And Mark came flying down the banister, and Maya came more slowly, and the Chairman of the Travis family dropped his briefcase on the marble floor and caught them both.
She thought: Maybe this is what my life was always going to be.
She thought: Maybe the cold is over.
She did not yet know that the thaw had barely begun.
