“I was watching you through the airport. Or rather, watching someone watch you.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, and I wonder if he slept on the last flight at all. “I might be wrong. I can’t tell.”

“Why was the driver laughing?”

“I told him we were running away together, and that I’d pay him double to help us get away from your husband.”

“You speak Italian,” I say belatedly, realizing that he’s back on his home continent—something he doesn’t look particularly pleased about at the moment.

“A little,” he says.

“More than I do.”

“You know what they say,” he says.

“No, what?”

“If you speak three languages, you’re trilingual. Two, you’re bilingual. One . . . you’re American.”

“Sad but true.”

We ride in silence, looking out at Trieste’s crowded streets filled with eateries, shops, banks, and offices with modern signs set in limestone buildings that look no less than hundreds of years old. We catch glimpses of the Adriatic. In another life, I’d want to walk, go down to the beach, take in the medieval charm of this place, along with some pizza.

For all I know, I’ve done that.

But more than that, I am aware of the gravity of him, of the air, heavy between us, filled with images of the flight before. The way he pulled back and touched my mouth where it was swollen yesterday, before kissing me again more slowly as my fingers tangled in his hair. This, from the man once charged with killing me. I am haunted, heady, at odds with the surreal fabric that has become my life.

We arrive at the bus station and Luka pays the driver—this time in euros.

“Where’d you get the euros?” I say, berating myself for not having thought of exchanging money.

“Left over from when we were here,” he says, getting out and reaching back for me.

And just like that I am revisited by the echo of a past I no longer own.

At the station he buys two tickets for the Autotrans bus just beginning to board, and we hurry down the stairs of the terminal. I climb on first and slide into one side of a bus only half full, next to the window. To my surprise, Luka sits beside me.

We say little as we travel east along the coast. When I start to droop against him, Luka draws me into his shoulder. The steady heart rate I enjoyed for the last leg of our trip spikes and never quite settles. Now that we’re here, the danger of my life before seems far more immediate and real.

“Luka . . .” I whisper.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know anything about my father?”

He tilts his head toward me. “Only that he was like you. Your mother was said to keep to her own kind.”

“Rolan basically called her a whore.”