The number was still ringing in Sarajevo. They picked up finally on the twentieth ring. She was lucky this time, for often she obtained one of the desk clerks who spoke poor English. This time it was the nineteen-year-old, the one who prided himself on his grasp of idiom, acquired from years of watching American gangster films.

He said Pascal had checked out; he’d returned that morning at four and left again half an hour later. For two hours the previous evening he had been trying to reach her, but the lines had been bad again. But he had received some of her messages, it seemed, and he would call her, without fail, in the next twenty-four hours.

Gini’s hands were shaking. She replaced the receiver and buried her face in her hands. She knew what that message really meant, and why it had been made to sound reassuring. It meant Pascal had some lead. It meant he had set off somewhere more dangerous than Sarajevo, before light came. There was usually a lull in military activities in the early morning; there was less likelihood of snipers, or of a sudden bombardment, in the few hours before dawn.

She could feel the fear mounting, this terrible disabling panic that always seemed to attack her when she was least prepared. She made herself get up and leave the room. She made herself be active. Returning to the kitchen, she washed the few dishes Charlotte had left in the sink, then pulled on a coat and took the dogs for a short run.

She walked around the garden, and the orchard, her footsteps leaving prints in the frosted grass. She looked up at the fields and the bare hills beyond, and tried to tell herself that this state of mind and state of heart would pass. The random would not occur. Pascal would be safe, and soon, surely soon, he would return. They might even come here, as Charlotte had suggested. They could walk in the hills in the warmth of a summer evening. Just a few months, and this landscape would be transformed. The trees would be in leaf; there would be flowers in bloom. She would love Pascal, and he would love her, and they would be able to talk or be silent, and once again they would both be secure.

Except… She turned back to the house and let herself into the silent kitchen. She sat down at the table and stared unseeingly at the wall. Except: she would rather not have remembered, but she could not forget the conversation with Helen, Pascal’s ex-wife, that had taken place in London shortly before Christmas, four weeks before.

She had met Helen, a thin, brisk, dark-haired Englishwoman, on two occasions before that, both with Pascal. This conversation, over a lunch that had been Helen’s suggestion, had been the first the two women had ever had alone.

Helen had remarried earlier that year. Her new husband, whom she referred to as her good, safe Englishman, was a widower with three teenage children away at boarding school. He had inherited and ran a successful textile manufacturing company that had recently taken over a French silk-weaving business with headquarters in Paris and factories in Lyon. The modernization of this once-famous company now took up much of his time, Helen explained. As a result, she and Ralph had decided to postpone their search for the perfect English country house, and were going to spend the next six months at Ralph’s Paris apartment; this plan had benefits for everyone concerned.