He showed her the box on a Saturday morning in late November.
It was raining again, a thin, glittering rain that turned the garden to a blur of green and gold. Mark had gone with Mrs. Alvarez to the village to buy ribbon for a school project, and the castle was quiet, the way a house is quiet when it is waiting. Maya found Travis in his study, standing at the window with his back to her, and on the desk behind him, lying open on a sheet of green baize, sat a small dented tin.
It had once been red. Most of the paint had flaked away, leaving a pitted grey surface scored with rust. The lid had been hammered flat so many times that it no longer quite fit. It looked like something that should have been thrown away thirty years ago.
"What is it?" she asked.
"The only thing I own that I didn't buy."
He turned.
His face was very pale. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and his mouth was set in a line she had come to recognize: the line of a man who has decided to do something terrifying.
"I've never shown this to anyone," he said. "Not Elena. Not Mark. I don't know why I want to show you. I only know that if I don't, I'll never..." He stopped. "Come here."
She crossed the carpet.
Inside the tin, on a bed of yellowed tissue, lay two objects.
The first was a scrap of paper. Brown at the edges, soft as cloth, creased with a thousand folds. It had once been wrapping, the thin, waxy kind that bakers use for loaves. Faint blue lettering ran along one edge: ...ANAHAN'S BAKERY, EAST END... And in the middle of the page, drawn in blunt pencil by a child's unsteady hand, was a small round sun with seven rays.
The second was a pendant.
It hung from a thin, tarnished silver chain, and it was no bigger than a thumbnail: half of a puzzle piece cut from mother-of-pearl, with a curved edge and a notch on one side, as though it had been broken from something once whole. On its back, scratched with a nail or a pin, was another tiny sun. Seven rays.
Maya stopped breathing.
She did not remember lifting her hand. She only knew, in the next instant, that her fingertips were at her own throat, closing around a thin silver chain she had worn every day of her life. She pulled it out from beneath her collar.
A half of a puzzle piece, cut from mother-of-pearl.
A curved edge. A notch.
She turned it over with shaking fingers.
On the back, worn almost smooth, scratched with a pin: a tiny round sun with seven rays.
The room went very quiet.
"Maya," said Travis.
She looked up.
He was standing with one hand pressed flat to the desk as if the floor had tilted. His eyes, ash-grey, shining, were fixed on the pendant at her neck. His lips had gone white.
"Tell me about the east end," he said hoarsely. "Tell me what you remember."
"I don't—" Her voice was a whisper. "I was little. I was eight. They moved me, after. I don't—"
"Tell me anyway."
She closed her eyes.
"There was an alley," she said slowly. "Behind the orphanage. It went down to the water, and there was a fence with a loose board, and on the other side there was a bakery. An old woman ran it. A big woman with an apron. She used to hand stale rolls through the fence to the kids, when she thought nobody was looking."
Travis made a soft sound.
"There was a cat," Maya whispered. "A black one. With a notch in his ear. We called him..."
"Soot."
Her eyes flew open.
"Soot," Travis said. The tears were running down his face. He did not seem to know it. "We called him Soot, because he was the color of chimney smoke. He slept in the boiler room with me in the winters. He used to bring me dead mice."
"The rain," she breathed. "It rained for days. The roof of the shed behind the orphanage, the one with the broken tiles..."
"It fell."
"I heard it. I heard the sound. Like thunder. And then someone was crying, and nobody came, and I..." Her whole body was shaking. "I ran out in my nightgown. I dug with my hands. The wood was wet and heavy and my nails kept breaking. And there was a boy. He was lying under a beam. His leg was caught, and he was so quiet, I thought he was dead. I told him, I told him, don't be scared, I'm right here, we're going to make it..."
"Maya."
"And he looked at me," she said, "and he had grey eyes."
She was crying now, too.
Travis took a step forward.
"The night before," he said, in a voice that had barely any breath behind it, "I hadn't eaten in two days. I was fifteen, and I was so hungry I'd started to see things. I was crouched behind the bakery, waiting for the bins. And a little girl came through the hole in the fence. She was about eight. Thin as a stick. In a nightgown. She was carrying half a roll. She'd saved it from her supper. She held it out to me and said..."
He stopped. His throat worked.
"She said, 'You look hungrier than me.'"
The tin shook in Maya's hands.
"And I said no. I said I couldn't. And she said, 'We'll share.' She tore it in half. She gave me the bigger half." A broken, wondering laugh. "She wrapped the crumbs in a piece of paper from the bakery, and gave me that too, and said, 'For later.' I kept it. I've kept it ever since. I never ate that last piece. I couldn't."
"The paper," Maya whispered.
"The next night the shed fell in. And the girl who'd given me her supper came and pulled me out of it with her bare hands."
Silence.
"When they carried me to the ambulance, you ran after me. You were screaming. You put something into my hand." He opened his fist, showing her the empty palm, as if the object still lay in it. "You said it was your mother's. That she'd left it with you when she went away. A silver chain with a pearl. It was cut in half. You said you'd keep one piece and I'd keep the other. So we'd always find each other." His voice shook. "And I scratched the sun on both with a nail while they were stitching my leg, because it was the only thing I could draw."
"I remember," Maya breathed. "I remember. I thought it was a dream."
"I went to juvenile hall for stealing. Eighteen months. When I got out, I ran back." He gripped the desk. "Sunflower House was gone. Torn down. Bulldozed. The woman at the bakery had died. The cat was gone. Nobody knew where the girl had been sent. I looked for fifteen years, Maya. Fifteen years. In every file, every orphanage, every foster record I could buy. I never found you."
"I never knew your name," she said. "You never said it. I only knew you as the boy with the grey eyes."
"Travis," he said, and he laughed, and it cracked in half. "It's Travis."
"I know it is."
"I saw you in the schoolroom, the first day. The scar behind your ear." He touched the place, lightly, with one trembling finger, and she shivered. "I told myself it couldn't be. I told myself it was a coincidence. I was too afraid to hope. I watched you with Mark, and every day I thought, ask her. And every day I thought, what if you're wrong, and you ruin the one good thing you've got."
"You idiot," Maya whispered.
"I know."
"You absolute idiot."
"I know."
She was laughing, and sobbing, and the tin slid from her fingers onto the desk, and then she was in his arms. He held her so tightly she felt her ribs creak. His face was in her hair. His shoulders shook. She heard him say it into her neck, over and over, a prayer, a litany, a child's wonder:
"It was you. It was you. It was you all along."
"The girl from then," Maya said into his chest, "was me."
"The girl from then," Travis said, "was you."
…
"Why are you crying?"
They broke apart.
Mark was standing in the study doorway in his raincoat, a spool of red ribbon in one hand, Mrs. Alvarez's anxious face hovering behind him. He was looking from his father to Maya and back again with an expression of grave, scientific concern.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"No, buddy." Travis wiped his face with the back of his wrist. "No, nobody's hurt."
"Then why are you both crying?"
Maya knelt, smiling through her tears, and held out her arms. Mark came to her, ribbon trailing, and she hugged him tight.
"We found something we lost a long, long time ago," she said.
"Was it a toy?"
"Yes." She looked up at Travis over the little boy's shoulder. "A very old one."
"Did it break?"
"A little," said Travis. His voice was soft. "But we found both pieces."
Mark thought about this gravely, his small brow furrowing.
"Can we fix it?"
Travis knelt down on the study rug beside them, and put one hand on his son's head, and the other on Maya's.
"I think," he said, "we already did."
