The letter came on the first Monday of December.
It was delivered at the front gate by a courier on a motorcycle who did not wait for a signature. The guard who took it said afterward that the man's face was hidden behind a visor, that he spoke no word, that he turned his bike and was gone before the barrier had finished rising.
It lay on Travis's desk in a cream envelope the weight of a playing card, sealed with black wax, stamped with the head of a wolf.
He did not touch it for a very long time.
"Open it," Maya said quietly.
"I know what it says."
"Then open it anyway."
He slit the seal with a letter-opener. The paper inside was thick and creamy, covered in a fine, spidery hand.
Travis,
I have what you want. It has been in my keeping for three years, and I find that I am no longer able to keep it. Come to the old lighthouse at Point Reyes on Friday at midnight. Come alone. If you bring an army, you will find an empty room.
I enclose a courtesy.
A.V.
A photograph had fallen out of the envelope. It lay face-down on the blotter.
Travis turned it over.
The color drained from his face.
It was a woman's hand lying on a white blanket. The fingers were thin and curled. On the fourth finger, loose, as if the flesh beneath had shrunk, was a plain gold band with a tiny chip in the setting. A chip that Travis had always meant to have repaired, and never had.
"Elena," he whispered.
His fingers closed on the photograph. The paper creased.
"Travis—"
"She's alive." His voice was hoarse and wild. "She's alive, Maya. He's had her. All this time. He's—"
"I know. I know." She caught his wrist. "Look at me. Look at me. It's a trap."
"I don't care."
"I do."
"If there's a chance—"
"There is a chance," Maya said, "and it's a hook. He wants you alone, at midnight, at the end of a cliff. What do you think happens next?"
He stared at her. His chest rose and fell. She saw the moment the cold anger came back into his eyes, the moment the Chairman returned, as if a mask had slammed down over the wounded man beneath.
"You think I'm not aware of that."
"I think you'd go anyway."
He said nothing.
"Don't," said Maya.
…
Chloe arrived at six o'clock, wind-whipped and furious and carrying a backpack the size of a small child.
She was waved through the gate by a bodyguard who looked at her uneasily, as though afraid she might bite. She marched across the front hall in muddy boots, dumped the backpack on a marble table worth more than her car, and turned a full circle with her mouth open.
"This is where you live?"
"This is where I'm staying," Maya said. She was already laughing.
"There's a chandelier. There's a chandelier in the hallway." Chloe flung her arms around her and held on so hard that Maya's feet left the floor. "I hate you. I love you. I'm going to murder somebody. Is this him?"
"This is him."
Travis had come down the staircase. He stopped on the bottom step with his hand on the banister, tall and grave and visibly uncertain, and for a moment the Chairman of the Travis family looked very much like a man who has been summoned to meet the girlfriend's best friend.
Chloe put her hands on her hips and looked him up and down.
"You're taller than I imagined," she said.
"I'm told that frequently."
"You're also the man whose enemies put my best friend in a house full of rifles."
"I am," said Travis quietly. "And I will spend the rest of my life making sure it never happens again."
Chloe's eyebrows rose a fraction. It was not the answer she had prepared for.
"Good," said Chloe, and her grin turned to flint. "Because if you ever hurt her, Mr. Chairman, I have a very large laptop and a very small conscience."
"Noted," said Travis gravely, and held out his hand.
She looked at it, sniffed, and shook it.
…
They spread her papers over the dining-room table.
She had been working for three weeks. Her backpack disgorged stacks of printouts, a laptop plastered with stickers, a handful of USB drives, three highlighters, and half a bag of pretzels. She sat at the head of the table with her legs crossed under her and explained it all, in the brisk voice of a woman who had stayed up for twenty-one nights with a cause.
"Augustin Vale," she said. "Seventy-four. Former shipping magnate, supposed to have retired nine years ago. Owns, through shell companies, about six hundred acres of forest east of the bay, including a villa that's been officially condemned since 1998. No wife. One daughter, deceased, on paper." She flipped a page. "Which we now know is a lie."
"Go on," said Travis. His voice was flat.
"I wanted to know how he got to Maya." She looked up at her friend, and her face softened. "Because that part never made sense. Why her? Why St. Jude? Why a nobody orphan with a hundred and fifty dollars in her bank account?"
Maya's mouth was dry. "I didn't even apply," she said slowly. "I remember now. The call, the interview. I never sent them my file."
"No. You didn't." Chloe slid a sheet across the table. "Somebody else did."
It was a scan of a school document, yellowed at the edges. Maya read the heading: ST. JUDE ACADEMY: BOARD OF DIRECTORS. MINUTES OF A SPECIAL SESSION. Halfway down the page, a paragraph had been highlighted in yellow.
...resolved that the Academy accept, with gratitude, an anonymous endowment of $2,000,000 from the Marguerite Vale Memorial Fund, on the condition that candidate SJ-9082 be admitted to the faculty on the basis of her records, which are to be treated as confidential. Principal E. Evans to ensure compliance.
"SJ-9082," Maya whispered. "That was the number on the file. The man on the phone said it."
"They paid two million dollars," Chloe said, "to get a twenty-three-year-old intern hired at a preschool."
"Marguerite Vale," said Travis, very softly.
"His late wife. Died forty years ago." Chloe turned the page. "But here's the part that's going to make you want to put your fist through a wall."
It was a medical record.
Maya recognized the logo at the top: SUNFLOWER HOUSE SOCIAL PROTECTION CENTER, ANNUAL HEALTH SCREENING. The date was two years old. A list of numbers marched down the page: blood group, antibody counts, a column headed HLA. At the bottom, in the margin, in a doctor's handwriting, someone had written:
Sample forwarded to H. Hale, Hale Research Associates, as per request. Patient not informed.
"Hale," Maya breathed. "The doctor in the villa. The one with the satchel."
"He's the physician to the entire Vale household." Chloe's voice was grim. "He's been on the payroll for twenty years. He took a sample from your annual checkup at the orphanage, under the pretense of a research study, and ran a tissue match against a patient he'd been caring for in secret." She tapped the highlighted line. "Look at the result."
Maya looked.
At the bottom of the page, underlined twice:
Compatibility with subject E.V.: 100%. Cardiac. Perfect match.
The silence in the dining room could have cut glass.
"A match for what?" Maya heard herself ask. Her voice sounded very far away.
"For her heart," said Travis.
She turned.
He was standing at the window with his back to them, perfectly still, and the shape of his shoulders told her everything.
"Elena's heart was failing," he said. "It always was. Her father knew. When she disappeared, I thought... I thought it was an attack. A kidnapping. Revenge." His voice shook. "It was never revenge. It was a rescue. The only kind he understood. He took her because he couldn't bear to let her die in my arms. And then he went looking for a heart to put in her."
"And he found mine," Maya whispered.
"He found yours." Travis turned, and his face was stone, and his eyes were burning. "He pulled you out of an orphanage, put you in a school where he could watch you, put you in a classroom beside the child of the man he hated most, and waited."
"Waited for what?"
"For you to be ready."
Maya's hand crept to her chest.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Remarkable, really.
She thought of the doctor with his stethoscope, the long grey ribbon of the cardiogram, the old man smiling at the report under his green lamp. She thought of the way he'd looked at her, as a farmer looks at a field.
She thought: All those weeks. All that kindness. All that patience. And I was his harvest.
She pushed back her chair.
Travis was at her side in a moment. His arms went round her, strong and warm. She leaned into them, trembling, her heart beating like a frightened bird against the bars of its cage.
"I'm here," he said fiercely. "I'm here. He will never touch you."
She raised her head.
"Then you can't go to the lighthouse alone," she said.
"Maya..."
"No. Listen." She caught his lapel. Her eyes were wet, but the voice that came out of her was steady. It was the voice she used on a classroom full of screaming children, the voice that did not argue and did not bend. "He wants you alone because alone you're easy. He wants me at his mercy because I'm the only one he can't buy. He's played this game for three years. But he's an old man with a failing plan, and we're two people who've finally stopped being afraid of each other."
Travis stared at her.
"I lived in his house," she said. "I know how it breathes. I know where his guards sleep, and which doors stick, and how the generator groans before the lights go out. I know which of his men would put down a gun if somebody gave them a reason." She drew a long breath. "He's wrong about one thing. He thinks I'm a weakness."
"You are," Travis said, almost to himself. "God help me, you are."
"Then let me be a weapon," said Maya. "Together."
For a long, long moment he looked at her, while the clock ticked in the hall and Chloe held her breath.
Then the Chairman of the Travis family bent his head, and pressed his forehead to hers, and said in a voice no louder than a prayer:
"Together."
