“I’m sorry, baby,” Michelle said. She couldn’t stop the tears now. “I’m so sorry.”

“We’ll talk later, Mom,” Adesina said. Her antennae twitched. “Everything will be all right. See, I’m safe now.” She paused, and when she spoke again the tremble was gone. “I’m who I’m supposed to be.”

The word had come to Barbara in Brussels. “Barbara, he’s alive.” Ink’s voice crackled over the speaker, and the words nearly made Barbara drop the phone from stunned fingers, that Lohengrin was alive.

“Klaus…?”

“Yes. Klaus. Tesseract sent him back to Jokertown. I made arrangements through the Secretary-General as soon as I heard. There’s a UN troop transport plane leaving from Brussels in an hour; I have you a seat on it…”

Now she was back in New York under a sky that was mockingly cloudless and blue, and she saw him, no longer Lohengrin but just Klaus, standing alongside a window, staring blankly outward to the bustle and confusion of the the city.

She felt all the fears, all her terrifying images of what might have happened to him and the nightmare of thinking he might even be dead, dissolve in that instant. She felt light suddenly.

“Klaus! My God…” Barbara rushed to him.

She ran to Klaus and embraced him, pulling him hard into her. “Klaus … I was so afraid that you were … you were…” She kissed his neck, his mouth, her fingers snared in his golden hair.

And she realized that his arms weren’t holding her in return, that she might as well have been kissing a stranger. “Klaus?”

He looked down at her, his single eye focusing slowly. His black eye patch was gone—he wore a makeshift white one with an elastic string tangled in his hair. A hint of a smile touched his lips, then vanished. He opened his mouth, but what emerged was a sob. He choked it back with an effort, his throat moving, and his hand reached out to touch her cheek. She clasped it, holding it there. “So awful,” he said. His voice was cracked and rough, as if he’d spent days shouting and roaring in the madness that had taken him. “Barbara, what I did … Es war schrecklich,” he finished in German: it was terrible.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she told him. “You know that.”

He shook his head mutely. His gaze searched hers, and she saw the moisture gathered in his eye. “I was right,” he said. “You needed to be in New York. You put together the team that saved us. You did what I couldn’t do.”

She shook her head as she hugged him again. She didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t care. “Klaus, I never knew what it was like for you, not really. I didn’t listen to you closely enough, didn’t hear what you were trying to tell me underneath all the words, and I’m sorry for that.” She took a step back from him, still holding his hands. “From now on,” Barbara said, “we will keep nothing from each other. We’ll be the team we were meant to be. We’ll tell each other what we’re feeling, what we’re thinking. There will be no secrets between us. Promise me that.”