EVENT SUMMARY & YOUR CHOICE:
At the end of Chapter 51, Travis revealed that Maya's place at St. Jude had been arranged by the old man, Augustin Vale, that the strangers who stalked her were Travis's men sent to protect her, and that Vale's doctor had secretly tested her tissue for a perfect heart match. He asked for her help to bring his son home.
You chose [BRANCH 1]: Trust Travis, stay, and work with him to save Mark.
Maya set down the cup.
The china made a small, definite sound on the table. Across from her, Travis went very still.
"Everything you've said," she began, slowly, "fits. And I don't know how to check any of it. I can't check any of it. I can only decide." She drew a breath. "I've spent my whole life deciding who was safe to trust. I've been wrong. I've been wrong so many times."
"Maya—"
"But there's a boy in a velvet room who said, I'm not mad, and waved at me." Her voice shook. "And there's a man who gave me a file thick enough to hang him with, and didn't remove a single page." She lifted her head. "I want to save Mark. Tell me what I need to do."
For a long moment he did not move.
Then the Chairman of the Travis family, who had faced down armies and broken men's careers with a phone call, bent his head over the table. His shoulders sagged. His hand rose, and pressed hard against his eyes.
"Thank you," he said, in a voice so low she barely caught it.
…
They talked until the clock struck one.
He told her everything. Or what he knew of it. He told her about the east-end docks and the boy who had run them. He told her about a girl named Elena who had walked into a warehouse in the rain, with a notebook against her chest, and how for three years she had been the happiest part of his life.
"Elena Vale," Maya said.
"Yes."
"Vale's daughter."
"She told me the night Mark was born." Travis smiled faintly, bitterly, at the table. "She'd run from her father's house at eighteen. She couldn't stomach what he was. She came to the docks to find a life that wasn't built on someone else's grave."
"And three years ago...?"
"She went to the city for a checkup. She never came home." His fingers closed on the edge of the table. "They found her car burned out at the bottom of a cliff. A ring in the ashes. No body."
"Oh, Travis."
"I buried an empty coffin." He said it flatly. "I told myself I'd find who did it. I searched Vale's holdings for years. I couldn't prove a thing." He drew a worn leather wallet from his breast pocket, opened it, and took out a small creased photograph. "Here."
She took it with both hands.
A young woman sat on a sunlit stone wall, laughing. She had warm brown eyes and dark hair blown across her face, and she held a few-months-old baby against her shoulder with the fierce, startled tenderness of a new mother. The baby had a fuzz of black hair and enormous grey eyes. He was staring at the camera as if it had personally offended him.
Mark.
The woman's chin tilted a little at the end. She had a small straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it laughed easily.
"That's why he took him," Travis said, "when he could. That's why he calls him grandson. He thinks Mark is the last piece of her. I think he's been waiting for years to get him back." His mouth twisted. "And I think the only reason he hasn't simply taken him by force is that he wanted something else first."
"My heart."
"A heart for himself, I suppose. He has a bad one." He paused, and a puzzled line formed between his brows. "I've never understood why he'd go to such lengths. It's an old man's greed. But it's patient, and it's cold, and it frightens me more than any gun."
A heart for himself.
Something nagged at the back of her mind, and she could not find it. She stared down at the laughing woman in the picture, at the baby.
She looks so happy.
"He's all I have," Travis said.
She looked up.
"Mark." His throat worked. "Everything else I've built is just... walls. Money. Men. Piers. It doesn't mean anything. I'd burn it all tomorrow." His voice thinned. "When I held him after the school, after I thought—" He couldn't finish. "I realized I'd spent three years pretending I was fine. I'm not. I'm terrified. I'm so frightened of losing him I can't sleep. I don't know how to be a father. I only know that when he's gone, I don't exist."
Maya reached across the table and laid her hand over his.
"You're a father," she said. "Tonight is the proof."
He turned his hand over and held on.
…
They went to work.
Dawn crept in grey at the windows of the gatehouse, and Travis's men came and went in the pale light with maps and coffee. A technician in horn-rimmed glasses bent over her collar, humming. He picked out the six stitches she'd sewn and extracted the black disc with a pair of tweezers, examined it under a lens, and nodded.
"Standard issue. Short range. Sends a pulse every ten minutes." He glanced at Travis. "We can leave it live, sir. Put it back exactly where it was. As far as the old man's concerned, she's walking around with it, and nothing's changed."
"And if she needs to signal us?"
The technician opened a tiny case. Inside, nested in foam, lay a grey wool button no bigger than a coat button.
"It is a coat button," he said, with a faint smile. "Sew it on the cuff. It's got a transmitter and a battery good for twelve hours. Hold it down for five seconds, and it sends your position and an alarm. Nothing on the outside will tell anyone it's there." He handed it to her. "Press hard. Count to five. We'll be there."
She closed her fingers around the little wool button.
Count to five.
"Now," said Travis, "the hard part."
"What's that?"
"Lying."
…
She had never been good at it.
At the orphanage, she had been the child who confessed to every crime before anyone asked. In college she'd blushed so violently at the smallest fib that her friends had a nickname for it. Chloe liked to say that Maya's face was a window with the curtains permanently open.
"You'll go back on Friday," Travis said. He sat across from her at the plain wooden table, sleeves rolled up, a legal pad before him. "You will tell him that I received the letter. That I'm shaken. That I'm prepared to meet his terms, but I can't move seven piers in a week. I need seventy-two hours."
"And proof of life."
"And proof that Mark is safe. A video. A recording. A voice. Insist on it. He can't refuse; it's reasonable."
"And then?"
"And then you stay with Mark, as his teacher, as you were, and you let him think you've given up." Travis's gaze was steady. "You wait. You watch. You learn the house. You learn his men, his habits, his schedule. We'll have the full three days, and we'll be ready."
"For what?"
"For whatever you find."
She nodded slowly.
"Say it," he said. "As if you were saying it to him."
She cleared her throat. "Mr. Travis received your letter. He is—"
"No. Slower."
"He is very frightened—"
"Don't say very. You're a teacher. Teachers say very when they lie."
"I do not."
"You do. Every single time."
She glared at him, and he, to her astonishment, grinned: a flash of white in that exhausted face, brief and boyish and devastating.
"Again," he said.
They went through it twenty times.
At the fifth try he became the old man. He drew himself upright in his chair, folded his hands on the table, and spoke in a voice so uncannily soft and courteous that the hair stood up on her arms. "My dear Miss Maya. How kind of you to return. I do hope the journey was not too tiresome..."
"Stop that," she said faintly. "Stop it. It's horrible."
"That's the point." He dropped the voice. "He'll test you. He'll watch your eyes. He'll ask you something unexpected, just to see where they go. Where do they go?"
"Down and left."
"Where should they go?"
"Straight at him."
"Good. Do it."
"Mr. Travis received your letter," said Maya, staring straight at him, "and he is prepared to meet your terms."
"Better."
"He needs seventy-two hours."
"Better."
"He wants proof that Mark is safe."
"Perfect." His voice had changed. It was quiet, almost rough. "That was perfect, Maya."
She became aware that her hands were trembling.
"I'm terrified," she said.
"So am I."
"It doesn't go away?"
"No." He smiled faintly. "You just learn to carry it."
The sun was fully up now. Outside the gatehouse window, a pale gold light lay across the wet lawn. A pair of crows picked at the grass. Somewhere inside the castle a clock struck eight.
He rose and came around the table.
For a moment she thought he would take her hand. Instead he stopped a foot away, and looked down at her with such weary, unguarded tenderness that her heart turned over.
"Go and sleep," he said. "There's a room made up for you at the end of the east wing. The key's on the inside of the door. You are free to leave at any hour. No one will stop you." His voice dropped. "But I hope you won't."
She stood.
"I won't," she said.
He nodded. She saw his throat move.
She was halfway to the door when his voice stopped her.
"Maya."
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
She looked back at him, standing in the pale morning light with the maps and photographs spread out behind him, a tall, tired man in a rumpled shirt.
"Don't thank me yet," she said gently. "Ask me on Saturday."
