Dao goes back to the villa for his passports. They’re in the room safe where he left them. There are three. One with his own name, one with the name of the man he’d become since getting to Lombok, and the third is a clean identity he hasn’t used yet. He stuffs them all into a pack, along with some clothes, his pills, and money. There’s blood on his shirt, so he pulls it over his shoulders and puts it in a plastic bag. He’ll get rid of it later. When his hands stop shaking, maybe. He hasn’t been this out of it since the night Jia died and he could do nothing to protect her. He’d wanted to, but the shock of the bullet tearing through his flesh took his breath away, and when he caught it again, it was too late. Jia was gone.

There’s a sound behind him.

He goes into the hall and sees the maid Riya, who he doesn’t really think of as little anymore. She’s rounding the corner, hurrying in the opposite direction. Shit. She still comes every day to clean, to get paid, but he has no idea where she’s been staying. Did she see the blood on his shirt? When the authorities come looking for who killed that lying, blackmailing son of a bitch Bernard Lam, will she conveniently remember seeing him here? What about when Sammy Saleh, his uncle, and his gang show up?

He shouldn’t have hit her after the quake. Shouldn’t have ever let it get personal. There’s only one thing left to do now.

He draws his gun and clicks the safety off. Makes his way silently down the stairs on bare feet. At the foot of the stairs now. A pause, then her voice coming at him softly from the entrance. He finds her there with a laundry basket at her feet, likely the reason she’d come into his room in the first place. She’s got her hand on the door, and she’s saying something to the child from the landslide, who’s now balanced on her hip.

Her hand lingers on the door, as though she can sense him behind her. But she doesn’t dare turn. Maybe she knows he’s got a gun.

“I didn’t see anything,” she says.

The child wipes her sleepy eyes and blinks awake.

His hand is on the trigger. But she didn’t see anything, she said.

He hesitates a moment too long.

She slips out, closing the door behind her. The sound of it shutting sets him in motion. He strides across to it and flings it open. There she is, hurrying away. She punches in a code at the gate and leaves before he can step outside.