The Bulgarian closed the cover to the keys. Ana stepped back through the library door. Her hair was fully down now, wet with rain, her cheeks glistening. No one had seen her before with her hair down, and in the candlelight, she looked to Kevin transformed, younger, quite striking actually. Pars noticed it too. He watched her cross the floor in her flannel pajamas and approach the Bulgarian. She took both his hands in hers (how delicate his were! she thought).

The man’s face was clear now, his eyes shining. Ana squeezed his hands. Because she didn’t know what else to say, because she wasn’t even sure he understood English, she simply whispered, Thank you, thank you.

The Bulgarian bowed stiffly, formally, the way he would in a concert hall; then he strode directly out of the room.

Ten

And so they slept. Each of them wearied by the waiting and then the storm, and now the music, which seemed to cast a spell on them all, inducing sleep. The wind whistled around the house, caught on the eaves, shunted the window glass, made the doors restive in their jambs; but still, they slept. Ana on the davenport, Claartija curled again in the overstuffed chair. The Italians on cots in the dining room, all beneath quilts and comforters. Even the Bulgarian had entered the circle of firelight and lay on the unclaimed couch. Ana handed him a pillow, and he didn’t protest but nodded in thanks, then dropped heavily on the velvet-covered cushions.

Wood snapped in the hearth. The Dutch girl snored. The fire slowly fell to embers. Pars didn’t return to his room upstairs. He lay instead on a rug on the floor and felt momentarily as if he were back in the safe house in Kurdistan where he’d hidden during his escape from Iran. He and four other refugees—a young Bahá’í boy, a woman from Tehran, the Marxist couple. They’d all slept on kilims on the mud floor for a week, waiting until the new moon, when it was safe to make the crossing at night, on horses whose hoofs were wrapped in felt. Where was the Bahá’í boy now? he wondered. Where was the woman? And because he kept thinking of them, Pars was the only one who couldn’t sleep. He lay awake listening to the wind and watching embers breathe in the hearth. The occasional flashes of lightning in the windows were distant now, far out to sea.

Sometime in the night, the rain ceased altogether. The Bulgarian mumbled in his sleep. Ana tossed on the davenport. Pars watched her at one point rise and walk to the window and stare into the night. What was she looking for? he wondered. Her birds? Her husband? On a night like this, it was almost easy to believe they were both out there, trying to get inside.