“Thank you.” I take the piece of paper and place it inside my handbag. As I do, a thought occurs to me. “That old mine of Belinda’s has been visited, you know. It needs to be secured. Do you understand?”

He nods like he’s already thought of this. “I’ll take care of it.”

Elliot seems made of all the best attributes a person could have.

“You are a true friend,” I say. “She’s lucky to have you in her life.”

He says nothing to this, perhaps because he believes not in luck but rather something deeper and truer and hallowed.

For the first time in many, many months, I wonder where my own life would have taken me if I had known and loved a man like Elliot Chapman.

“I can escort you to the platform if you want help with the luggage,” he says.

This thought makes me laugh, and he smiles wide, too, at my needing help with a travel case I dragged across the peninsula with Kat in tow, all while being chased by fire and uncertainty.

“Thank you again for the ride,” I answer as I pick up the case and take Kat’s hand.

Together my girl and I make our way through the depot and onto the platform, where our train is waiting for us.

• • •

The day is long and uneventful as we steam ever farther south. I get out Da’s word book after we leave San Jose, but my many attempts to have Kat choose a word for the day go unrewarded. I finally choose one for us. It’s a French word. Ménage. It means all the persons who make up a household.

We sleep a little, watch the world go by—most of it farmland opening up to desertlike terrain—and eat sandwiches Belinda made for us. When we finally reach the Los Angeles depot, a large structure with skylights and an arched roof that soars above the station’s platforms, it is near nightfall. I find us a little hotel a block away from the station so that we can easily get to our early-morning train to Tucson. The buildings here are not as tall as those in San Francisco were, and the feel of the place is different, too. The sun seems closer somehow. And the sky bigger.

If Kat finds this corner of California familiar to her, I can’t tell. I’m sure she was at this train station when she and Martin left Los Angeles, but I see no evidence on her face that this place has any meaning to her. There is only the slight sheen of anxious expectation in her eyes; at least that’s what I think it is. I am tempted only for a few seconds to ask the hotel manager if I might use their telephone and pay whatever it will cost to call the sanatorium in Tucson and tell the nurse in charge that we are coming. Right now Kat is still mine, and when I hand her over tomorrow to Candace she won’t be.