Shan stared at the last email, trying to understand. The dissident professor had become the prisoner who couldn’t remember his own name, the professor who had arrived at prison wearing a monk’s robe. Had he been beaten so badly he had suffered brain damage? Shan’s foreboding began to descend on him again. Every time he thought he had found one answer, two more questions seemed to rise. He wasn’t confronting a murder, he was tumbling into a black hole of violent intrigue and politics.

“You should go home, Pike,” Shan said. “If you stay, you’ll become another ghost.”

Pike seemed not to hear. “She was just getting a foothold on life,” he said in a distant voice. “She stumbled early on, raised by her mother. I was never there for her. Mostly sent to boarding schools. Then when her mother remarried, she suddenly had stepsisters who seemed determined to drive her out of their family. We only grew close later, when she moved to a college near my home. I started declining trips so I could spend more time with her. Then I introduced her to the son of an old army buddy, an officer in the Army Rangers, and months later they were engaged. When he was deployed to Afghanistan, he made her promise to finish her college work while he was away, and she made him promise they would get married as soon as he returned. But he didn’t return. Killed by an explosive device when driving some Afghan girls to a school on his day off. It took her over a year to recover. This trip to Tibet was her way of starting over, making a clean break. She was enrolled in graduate school, ready to start when she returned.” Pike clenched his jaw, as if choking down emotion.

“Before she left I told her she was the miracle of my life, my anchor that let me withstand all the storms that raged around me. She smiled and said then we had given each other a miracle and promised to write me every week. She did for the first month and wrote that she had discovered the importance of committing to something bigger than yourself.”

“You should go home,” Shan said again. “It’s what she would want. Stay alive.”

The American looked down into his hands with a weary expression then extracted a tattered envelope from inside his sweatshirt. “Her last letter. I must have read it a hundred times.” He handed it to Shan.

Dear Papa, Shan read. Professor Gangfen says I am learning to adeptly straddle the centuries as we dig, which I think he means as a compliment. This week I unearthed a nearly intact bridle with a bronze bit all on my own! The letter went on to describe how she had made new friends and spent the weekend in Lhasa, where she had gone to the magnificent Potala and the ancient temple complex.