Yet you generously allowed me to keep my secrets, and when I reflect on the greatness of your spirit, I am once more overcome by this love I confessed to you only once, but which I felt with all my soul from the very earliest moment of our friendship. You will say in your brisk American voice that I am a sentimental idiot, but it is my honor and privilege to be a sentimental idiot on this subject, and to be grateful to God that He has granted me this final joy when I had thought all joy impossible. It is the last remaining desire of my heart to reunite with you after the war is finished, so that I may explain all this from my own lips, but if God wills that we shall not meet again on earth, I pray this letter will find you instead.

You will find the wreckage of Samuel Mallory’s airplane in the shelter of a grand massif in the Bardenas Reales, in the province of Navarre, in the northeast part of Spain. Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, and the diary that belonged to Mr. Mallory, which will shed some light, I suspect, on the events that led to this catastrophe. To all this I can only recommend that you use your immense cleverness to gather all these hints into a map that will guide you to what you seek, because I cannot commit to paper any further confidence, or even reveal to you how this knowledge came to me.

May you discover happiness, my beloved, and may a merciful God forever bless you.

Velázquez

I think about this letter, and the particular phrase Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, as I pedal my bicycle furiously through the wind and rain down the highway into town. It’s funny how you can assume all along that a sentence means one thing, because of your own particular assumptions, when really it can mean something entirely different if you examine it from a fresh perspective.

When I reach the pier, the ferry is still tied securely to its mooring, and the sign on the gate reads closed for weather. But nearby, a fellow’s bustling about a smaller, nimbler boat, preparing it to launch. I call out and the man turns, and right away I see from Leo’s face that he’s heard about the reporters gathered at the airfield, and not only has he heard the news but he’s holding me responsible.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I yell.

Leo turns away and ducks into the deckhouse. I climb off the bicycle and jump over the railing.

“Don’t you dare ignore me! I need to find her right now!”

“You don’t have the right!”