Dinner was a pot of beans and a few slices of bacon, fried expertly in an iron skillet, along with tomatoes and new carrots and some greens I didn’t recognize, all grown by Thorpe in a garden he’d constructed himself. I said maybe he was a botanist after all, and he said it was perfectly true, if I came to England he would show me his degrees. Two firsts at Cambridge, he said bashfully, whatever that meant. I wore one of his old shirts and nothing else, because my dress was sweaty and caked with powdery pink-white Bahamas sand. The shirt smelled of Thorpe, of his laundry soap. After we ate, I helped him with the dishes while the sun fell and the stars popped out in the giant purple sky. We made love on the porch, in a wicker chair. Later, again, in his bedroom, atop his narrow bed under the whir of an electric fan, sweaty and indiscreet, the cry of climax like a death groan. By the time Thorpe fell asleep, it was almost midnight. We were twisted in a curiously restful contortion, Thorpe cradling me while his head rested against my belly. I remember feeling his hair in my hands, his beautiful hair, crisp with salt, and the last thing I saw was his milky skin, the bumps of his spine splitting his broad back, his scarred cheek relaxed in slumber.

I can’t say why I woke an hour later. I should have slept like the dead, so sapped as I was, but they do say the brain is subject to certain stimuli that the common senses can’t perceive. Whatever the reason. I startled awake, as I said, and experienced a moment of utter panic. I thought it was the wrong room, the wrong man, that the past two years had been a dream from which I had just emerged, and if it hadn’t been for the moonlight on Thorpe’s rufous hair, blazing with an unnatural saturation of color, he might have found himself as dead as Mr. Randolph. As it was, I slumped back against the pillow and glanced out the window, and that was when I noticed the peculiar orange tinge to the horizon, which had turned Thorpe’s hair such a vivid shade of ginger. I thought it couldn’t be dawn already. Then I realized I was facing south, not east, and I pushed Thorpe’s shoulder.

“Fire,” I gasped.

Thorpe bolted awake, just as I had, and stared at me in the same confusion I had felt, then the same recognition. I pointed to the window. He swore and leapt from the bed.

“Put on some clothes,” he said, running out the door at a terrible limp. “I’ll ring up Government House.”