You lean close and you take the linguist’s hand in both of yours. You’re not going to ask her if she still wants to go, if she can do that. You’re not going to order her to go. And by the time Lowry finds out what you’ve done, it will be too late.

She stares at you with an eviscerated smile.

“You can stand down,” you tell her. “You can go home. And it’s going to be okay, it will all be okay.”

With those words, the linguist recedes from you, gliding back into darkness, her and the chair and the room, as if they were merely props, and you’re above Area X again, floating over the reeds, down toward the beach, the surf beyond. The wind and the sun, the warmth of the air.

The questioning is over. Area X is done with you, has taken every last little thing out of you, and there’s a strange kind of peace in that. A backpack. The remains of a body. Your gun, tossed into the surf, your letter to Saul, crumpled and tumbling across the dried seaweed and the sand.

You are still there for a moment, looking out over the sea toward the lighthouse and the beautiful awful brightness of the world.

Before you are nowhere.

Before you are everywhere.

Dear Saul:

I doubt you will ever read this letter. I don’t know by what means it might get to you or if you could even understand it now. But I wanted to write it. To make things clear, and so that you might know what you meant to me, even in such a short time.

That you might know that I appreciated your gruffness and your consistency and your concern. That I understood what those things meant, and it was important to me. That it would have been important even if all the rest of this had not occurred.

That you might know that it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anything you did. It wasn’t anything other than bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—the same way it always happens, according to my dad. And I know this is true because it happened to me, too, even though I chose a lot of what’s happened to me since.

Whatever occurred back then, I know you tried your best, because you always did try your best. And I am trying my best, too. Even if we don’t always know what that means or how it will play out. You can get caught up in something that’s beyond you, and never understand why.

The world we are a part of now is difficult to accept, unimaginably difficult. I don’t know if I accept everything even now. I don’t know how I can. But acceptance moves past denial, and maybe there’s defiance in that, too.

I remember you, Saul. I remember the keeper of the light. I never did forget about you; I just took a long time coming back.