For three days, she didn’t go back to her lab. She returned no one’s calls. She felt like a fugitive inside her own loft. It was good to have a body in her bed. Someone she barely knew. Someone who understood. Someone, she kept thinking, whom Russell would have liked. Would he care? Did it matter? Wasn’t it only survival, one body with another? A fugue, that was the word Mrs. McIntyre used for Mrs. Liang. A fugue was a musical piece in polyphonic form, where a theme was introduced by one, harmonized by another and then another, contrapuntally, and reintroduced throughout. Yet it was also the name for a momentary flight from reality, an amnesia, brought on by monumental stress. That was what had happened, they said, to Mrs. Liang. Why she’d ended up incoherent in the lighthouse on Trachis Island. But wasn’t that too what was happening now to Ana? A fugue. An escape. A flight from reality? In these last few days at least. Wasn’t she too trying simply to escape?

On the day Pars left, he stood with his bag by the door and they kissed, and it was something slightly more than just a good-bye kiss—but not much more. She asked him to call as soon as he returned home. He squeezed her hand in parting. He smelled a bit like pine needles.

Was it good to see him? Yes. No. She wasn’t sure. But after he left, she closed the loft door behind him and stood with her back to it and wept; she felt relieved and saddened and confused all at once, but mostly relief, that he was gone. The loft was empty again. It belonged to her and Russell, as it should. Outside, on the roof, the dead miscanthus shivered in the wind. The Japanese maple. She went to the kitchen table. The Hafiz was still there, where they’d left it days ago in its Strand bag. She remembered what he’d said about the cockatiel, the augur, and she fanned the pages bravely, tearily, stopped at random, then opened the spine and read:

This Sky where we live

Is no place to lose your wings.

So love, love,

Love

Nineteen

On Trachis Island the days grew long. The nights brought freezing rain, then snow, then sleet. The recovery ships pulled anchor and steamed away, and once again the sea offshore was left in silence. Kittiwakes keened. The bays froze solid. Murres bobbed and dove into the icy foam.