The safe house was a farmhouse on the coast, two hours north of the city, with a slate roof, a woodstove, and a kitchen that smelled of coffee and old apples.
Dr. Okafor, who had been waiting there since midnight, cut the sleeve from Travis's arm and cleaned the wound while he sat at the kitchen table with his jaw clenched. It was a graze, as he had said. It took eleven stitches. He did not make a sound, and he did not once look away from Maya.
Mark was asleep by then, curled in a blanket on the sofa with his cotton rabbit under his chin. Marcus, the granite-faced guard, sat on the floor beside him with his back against the wall and his rifle across his knees. He had said, an hour ago, that he would sit there until somebody told him to stop, and nobody had.
When the doctor had gone and the room was quiet, Travis said, "Tell me what you saw."
She had been waiting for the question. She had rehearsed it in the car, in the cold dark, counting stars. Still, when she opened her mouth, nothing came.
"Maya."
"Sit down," she said. "Please."
He sat.
She put both hands flat on the table to keep them still.
"There's a door under the stairs," she said. "A white door with a keypad. Mark told me about it. Vale goes in there at night, and talks to someone, and says darling." She made herself meet his eyes. "I opened it. Behind it there is a room with lilies, and a bed, and a machine that breathes for her."
"For her."
"Travis." Her voice cracked. "It's Elena."
He did not move.
It was the stillness of a man who has been struck so hard he has not yet fallen. His face emptied. The color went out of it, and then, slowly, came back, in two bright patches. His lips parted. Nothing came out of them.
"She's alive," Maya whispered. "She's been in that house for three years. She isn't awake. She hasn't been awake. But she's breathing, and her hair is brushed, and someone puts fresh flowers by her bed every day." She swallowed. "He told me himself. He said he took her home."
"He said..." Travis's voice was unrecognizable. "He told you."
"He said he did it all for love."
A sound came out of Travis then, low and terrible and torn, and he bent forward until his forehead touched the table, and his shoulders shook. She had never seen a man cry like that: silently, with his whole body, as though the grief had been standing behind him for three years waiting for permission.
She got up and went round the table. She put her arms around his bowed head and held it against her, and he clutched her waist, and she felt the hot wet of his face through her blouse.
"I buried her," he said. "I buried an empty box. I stood at the grave, and I told my son his mother was in heaven." His breath hitched. "She was twenty minutes from my door."
"I know."
"I should have known."
"You couldn't have."
"I should have burned that house down three years ago."
"You did tonight."
A broken laugh. It turned into something else.
She held him until he was quiet.
…
When he lifted his head, his eyes were red, and very clear.
"The heart," he said. "He took you for the heart."
"Yes."
"For her."
"Yes. Dr. Hale tested me twice. He said I was a perfect match. He said it was textbook." She hesitated. "I think the old man chose me when I was seven years old. The scholarship, the school, the internship. Everything."
"I know. I read the file." His fists closed on the table. "I read it and I thought he wanted you for himself. I never once thought—" He stopped. "He needed her alive. He needed her heart to be good. He needed it to come from someone who wasn't poisoned by the life he'd lived."
"He said that. He said it would not do to give her a bad one."
Travis laughed again, softly, horribly.
"Then he has something in common with me," he said. "We both chose you because of what you are."
She went still.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "I promised I would, when you came back."
"Travis, you don't have to—"
"I do. I've waited fifteen years." He rose, took a step, and for a moment she thought he might fall. Then he reached for the collar of his shirt, and drew out a thin chain from underneath it, and held up what hung from the end.
It was a pendant: half of a pearl-white puzzle piece, cut with a jagged edge. A little sun was scratched into the mother-of-pearl, seven short rays, crudely, as though by a child with a nail.
Maya's hand went to her own throat.
She wore the other half.
She had worn it every day since she was four. A necklace left with a baby at an orphanage gate. She had never taken it off. In all her twenty-three years, she had never met anyone else who had one.
She pulled the chain over her head. Her fingers shook so badly that it took three tries. She held it out in her open palm, the second half, with its own jagged edge, and its own small sun.
He laid his piece beside it.
It fit.
There was a sound like a breath being drawn in the room, though it came from neither of them. The firelight ran along the seam. Two halves of a broken thing became one, and the little suns joined at the edges and made a single golden circle.
"It was a long time ago," Travis said. His voice was almost inaudible. "I was fifteen. I was behind a bakery on the east end, eating out of the bins, and I hadn't eaten for two days. There was a fence. And a little girl climbed over it in her nightgown, with a paper bag."
Maya's lips parted.
"She was about eight. She had black hair in two crooked braids. She stood there shaking in the rain and she held out half a roll, and she said, Here. It's still warm." His eyes were shining. "I thought she was an angel. I thought I'd died."
"You," she whispered. "It was..."
"She drew a sun on the paper with a pencil. Seven rays. She told me, when you're sad, look at it, it'll come out." He drew a ragged breath. "I kept that paper for fifteen years. I have it in a tin in my desk. I've looked at it every time I wanted to die."
"Oh, God."
"The next night, the shed where I slept collapsed on me in the storm. I was buried under the beams. And a little girl came out of the dark with a spade bigger than she was, and she dug until her hands bled, and she dragged me out by my collar." He laughed, and the tears ran down. "Then we broke a pendant in two so we'd find each other. And two weeks later she was gone, and the orphanage had moved her, and nobody would tell me where."
She could not breathe.
"I looked for you for fifteen years," Travis said. "In every city. Every file. I built an empire so I'd have the eyes to look. I thought I'd failed. I thought you were dead." His hands closed over hers, over the two halves. "And then Mark came home from school with a drawing of a teacher with black hair and a pink apron, and said, Daddy, her necklace has a sun on it."
"That's why," she said. "That's why you had me watched."
"I had you watched because I didn't believe it. I didn't dare. I sent Rourke to check, and he came back and said, Boss, I think it's her. And I couldn't—" He shut his eyes. "I couldn't walk up to you. I'd just killed a man that month. I had blood in my ledgers and ash in my mouth, and you were this light. Walking through a rainy street with your arms full of paper stars. I thought, if I touch her, I'll stain her."
"So you sent men to follow me," she said. "To keep me safe."
"So I could look at you," he said, "from a distance. And not be afraid."
She stared at him for a long time.
Then she threw her arms around his neck.
"I remember you," she said into his shoulder, and her whole body was shaking with laughter and sobs. "I remember the rain. You were so thin. You ate that roll in two bites, and you said thank you, and I thought—" She laughed wildly. "I thought, I'll marry that boy."
He made a sound that broke in the middle.
He held her so tightly she thought her ribs would crack, and she did not care.
…
Later, much later, when the fire was low and the farmhouse silent, they sat on the floor with their backs against the sofa, with Mark asleep above them and the two halves of the pendant lying joined in her lap.
"I love you," she said.
He turned his head.
It had come out of her without warning, simple and quiet, like the answer to a question she had not known she'd been asked. She looked at the little golden sun and said it again, to be sure.
"I love you. I think I always did. I just didn't know whose face it was."
Travis did not speak. He took her hand, and turned it over, and pressed his mouth to the palm, and held it there.
"Don't leave me," he said against her skin. It was not a command. It was not even a plea. It was the voice of a boy of fifteen with his face to the rain. "Not this time. Whatever I am. Whatever I've done. Don't leave."
"I won't."
"Say it again."
"I won't leave."
"Again."
"Travis." She laughed, wet-eyed. "I'm not going anywhere. You'd have to drag me."
"I would," he said, very low. "I would. You should know that. I'm not a good man. If you tried to go, I'm not sure I'd let you."
She turned her face to him in the dark.
"Then it's lucky," she said, "that I'm staying."
Above them, in his sleep, Mark murmured, Ms. Maya, and turned over on the cushions. His small hand slid off the edge of the sofa and came to rest in her hair.
Neither of them moved for a long time.
Outside, on the black water, the first grey light of morning began to stir.
