He grinned. “Now there’s a declaration of undying love if I ever heard one.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re right. My feelings are complicated. By a lot of things.” It was true. She wasn’t sure how she felt about David. He was a harbor after a storm, and deeply valued for that. She liked, admired, and in a very real sense, needed him. But did she love him? Could she love anyone? Did she dare? Her feelings for this man raised so many red flags from her past, small-craft warnings fluttering in the winds of emotion.

“It’s okay, Laila,” he was saying now, completely serious. “Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

It was a few months later, on a midweek sail out to Santa Rosa, just the two of them at an anchorage David knew, that he asked her to marry him. “You don’t have to answer until you’re ready,” he added. “I just want you to know how I feel.”

Two days after that, she invented an excuse to go to France. She needed to be away from David for a while, she told herself—a couple of weeks, a month—to sort things out. She needed to remember what life had been like without him.

What she discovered was that life without him no longer existed. In the Louvre, a Monet seascape reminded her of the North Star. Over dinner with friends at Le Carre des Feuillants, she found herself wondering if she could prepare an amateur version of the meal for David. At a party, she wished he were there, so that they could laugh later about the idiosyncrasies of this or that Parisian video artist or fashion designer or politician’s mistress.

When he called, it was a comfortable thing, as if she were just across town and seeing him the next day. Then, in one conversation, he asked, as an after- thought, whether she had her birth certificate in California.

“No. Why?”

“I just thought of it. You ought to pick it up, or get an official copy, while you’re there. Never know when it’ll come in handy. Who knows, you might want to get married someday.”

Despite that last comment, the birth certificate didn’t seem like pressing business, and it slipped her mind for days. Then, one afternoon, she remembered and decided that she might as well have it. It would be right here in the Paris house—in the wall safe where Malik kept personal papers. He was in Marseilles at the moment, but she knew the combination from years of watching him open the safe.

She had no intention of prying; the birth certificate should be easy to find. But as she went through the sheaf of papers, some items naturally tugged at her attention.