“Almost. Thank God, not quite.”

In his face, she seemed to see the years that she had lost but he had lived. “How long ago?”

“The man, the knife? Ten years.”

Shock silenced Emily for a mile, and then she said, “I dreamed. I didn’t realize how very long I was dreaming, Davey. I dreamed of anniversaries, celebrations, journeys, children. I dreamed . . . a life. Davey, what was that place? What happened there?”

For the moment, he had lost the talent to weave a story. He was unable to think where to begin.

Instead, he wondered how they would explain her reappearance, what tale of amnesia they would concoct and how they would anchor it with enough hard facts to satisfy both those who had known her and the authorities—and Isaac Eisenstein. There would be a way. He had no doubt they could do it. Life was a tapestry of stories. People spun stories ceaselessly, every day of their lives, whether they were writers or not.

She respected his silence, as if she understood that he wasn’t buying time to deceive, but was struggling to decide how best to lead her through the extraordinary maze of truth that they could never dare to share with anyone.

The rain relented. Santa Barbara glittered in the darkness, necklaces of light across the hills.

He would not return the Explorer to Estella Rosewater just yet. Call her later. Come north again in a few days to collect his things at the motel and retrieve the rented Terrain Denali. Tonight, they would drive all the way to Corona del Mar. To the yellow bungalow with the white shutters, where the yellow porch swing waited to be swung and yellow hibiscus bloomed in abundance.

At last he said, “You know the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice.”

Her eyes were blue gems in the instrument-panel light. “Eurydice treads on a serpent and dies of its bite. Orpheus is a great poet and musician. He descends into the land of the dead, using music to charm his way past Charon and various demons, to rescue his beloved Eurydice.”

David said, “Hades allows him to take her, though Orpheus must vow that he won’t look back at her until he’s led her into the land of the living.”

She said, “At the last moment, he breaks the vow, looks back at her, and loses her forever.”

“Let’s start with that,” David said, as clouds began to tatter and beams of moonlight found the sea. “This time, I did not look back.”

About The Author

About the Author