Nazari was asleep, and she had no clothes on. I took mine off and slipped back under the covers, careful not to wake her. But I failed and she woke. Although not entirely. A little bit, but not all the way. Enough to use her sense of touch and smell and maybe other senses that I wouldn’t know about first hand because they were all hers. But it was enough to get us started all over again. As if the passage between this time and last time had just been an interlude between movements of a single orchestration. Which in a way it had been. And this time it was all slow and quiet and sleepy, just as good as last time if not much better.

Afterwards we lay on our backs looking up at the ceiling, dark except for a couple of streaking moonlight reflections coming in through the window. They started as thin points of light and spread wider as they crossed the room. We’d neglected to draw the curtains all the way. The blue of dawn was just beginning to show.

Across the room, something buzzed, like a dentist’s drill. Light from the burner phone shone through my discarded pants pocket. The phone vibrated a couple more times before I reacted. I stretched out to where I’d dropped my clothes and after fumbling around with it, fished out the burner. I showed the screen to her. Unknown Number. She nodded, silently.

I pressed the green button but it was too late, the other side had hung up, or had been redirected to voicemail. The only thing that showed on the screen was the call record.

Unknown Number.

Chapter Forty-One

I slept for a couple of hours and woke up hungry. Nazari wasn’t in bed.

So I went downstairs, following a trail of breakfast smells. They were good smells. The kind of smell you hoped for, waking up in the morning. Bacon, freshly baked pastries, coffee. Nazari and Madame Vaugeois were in the kitchen. The oven was on and I looked through the glass door. Croissants.

I hadn’t had many opportunities to eat croissants as a search and rescue operator. We lived on base most of the time, and there weren’t any croissants. Other times we lived outdoors, in a range of climates and locations. No croissants there either. We ate a large portion of our meals out of bags in fact, they call them MREs, meals ready to eat. Ready to eat military meals don’t usually feature flaky crusts and hot, soft interiors. Mostly we root around in the bag until we’re done, which doesn’t take long. Early in my first Afghanistan tour one French ration could be traded for five US MREs. Which is just one reason why I fisted one croissant after another into my mouth with no shame at all. I washed them down with strong black coffee that Nazari had brewed.