I didn’t dare to say his name. I was racking this up as a hallucination because how under Heaven could anyone have so perfectly re-created the boy-man I’d been with in Atalantaya during the time when my heart had been stopped. The dimples, the cleft in the chin, but more than anything the large vibrant eyes and the intense feeling that appeared to heat him all over from within.

“It’s me,” he said, his warm fingers squeezing my hand tight enough to hurt a mortal hand. “It’s Amel.”

“I’m going to lose it,” I said quietly. I could hardly speak. Beyond him I saw Louis approaching with his newspaper, but when Louis saw what was happening at the table, he nodded, folded the paper, and moved out of sight.

There was no way to put into words what I felt. This was Amel. Amel, alive; Amel as fully realized and present in this body and this body was a living breathing replica of the body he’d lost when Atalantaya had fallen into the sea.

He couldn’t read these thoughts from me, apparently, and finally I said the only thing I could say. “Thank Heaven!” I put my hand up to shield my eyes and I cried. I sat there crying for a long time, and finally, I managed to find my handkerchief, and I blotted my eyes, and folded the linen to hide the blood.

“How many times have you been here?” he asked. He imprisoned my right hand again and I saw that he’d been crying too. The cadence of his voice, the pitch, the timbre—it was all the same as the voice he’d shaped in my head.

When I didn’t answer, he started up again as if he couldn’t contain himself.

“This is the first week,” he said, “that I’ve been allowed out by myself, the first week I’ve been permitted to walk the streets unattended, the first week I’ve been allowed to be nearly run over by traffic, or to get lost, or to be mugged and robbed of my papers, or to get sick after overeating and gag in an alleyway on my own.” He stopped only to laugh and then went right on, his white teeth sparkling and his eyes coloring beautifully in the lights. “I told them if they didn’t let me out, I was going to run away. I swore that if they didn’t let me make a few blunders on my own, I was going to go on a hunger strike. Of course they reminded me that we don’t need food, and nothing much would happen except that I’d be miserable, but finally Kapetria drove me into the Boulevard Saint-Michel and I jumped out of the car and walked off.”