He had had, he said, a film in his head: this film had sustained him throughout his trip. He would reach her room, walk into it: these were the words they might say to each other; these were the things they might then have done. This film, revised, had still been in his mind a few hours before, when, at six forty-five, he dialed her room at the St. Vincent for the fourth time in four hours—and Rowland McGuire picked up. Reaching this point in his account, he could not continue. She saw his face change, take on an expression she had often seen before, and which, in Bosnia, she had come to think of as his pre-firing-line look.

Pascal’s rivals, his ex-wife, and, indeed, even her father, had often accused him of having some adrenaline sickness, a death wish. Gini knew that to be untrue: Pascal always weighed very precisely the risks he took. It was true that he was less protective of his own safety than were most people, but he was not foolhardy. Before he made the decision to move forward into some danger, some firing line, there was that one brief, taut moment of assessment. This expression she saw on his face now, as he turned back to look at her for the first time since he began to speak. He was standing absolutely still, she saw, the light from the window slanting across the planes of his fierce, narrow, intelligent face. His gray eyes met hers steadily, and she knew he was weighing their past, what they had had—was perhaps weighing her against that morning’s events. She felt a lurch of fear then, for Pascal hated compromise, and she knew he was more than capable of walking out of this room now, of ending it quietly but firmly, and then never relenting, never coming back.

She gave a low cry, half anguish and half protest; his face changed. He crossed to her, and, touching her for the first time, took her hand in his.

“Listen to me. Look at me.” He turned her face to his. “Gini, we have to move beyond this. I can’t—at the moment I can’t see and I can’t think. Something must have been so terribly wrong. Darling—you’re so thin. Your hair. Your face—”

His voice became unsteady. He drew her toward him. “You’ve been hiding things from me—on the telephone, in your letters. I don’t mean that man—nothing to do with him. Gini, why did you do that? What’s happened to you since you left me? I thought we had no secrets from each other.”

He paused, his expression bewildered, his eyes searching her face. When she did not immediately reply, he clasped both her hands tight and forced her again to look at him.

“Right. This is what we do. We leave now—yes? We leave Paris together, by the first available flight. And then we go back to London, to our apartment, or some other quiet place, where we can be alone together and we can talk. We can retrieve this, but we have to do it at once. Now. Darling, look at me. Say you’ll do that.”