I grab my backpack as Ivan leads me past a curtain to the rear of the restaurant, through the kitchen and a grungy back door. Despite my nerves, I note, if slightly hysterically, that I’ve done this trick before.

We move down the crooked alley behind the café. It’s narrow and who knows how old, open windows overhead gossip length apart, the occasional clothesline bridging the gap between them. I glance back to see that the woman has put on her sunglasses, that the pair follow wordlessly as we turn past a grotto chapel. We stop at a wooden door, a crest of some kind carved into the stone above it. Ivan pulls a key from his pocket, glances past us as he unlocks and then holds the door open just enough for the couple to usher me inside.

The minute he locks the door behind him, the dizziness is back, and this time I know it isn’t my overloaded adrenal glands but them. Ivan in particular. I feel his presence like a wave—not the kind of surge that knocks you over but the eddy that buoys and surrounds.

I put out my arm to steady myself, and the guy in the fedora catches me by the shoulder. We are standing in a side room lit through a lattice by what looks like construction work lights. Some kind of restoration has been halted on the other side, and I realize as I take in a stack of hymnals that this is an annex to the chapel.

The woman removes her glasses and studies me coolly as Ivan moves to peer through the lattice. Seeming satisfied that we are alone, he finally turns to me.

“Audra. It’s really you,” he says, as though he had not fully believed it until now. He is not in his forties, as I first thought, but younger, grizzled less by age than by weather or choice. He is not striking, though who knows what a haircut and shave might do for him. Nor is he tall, though the instant he stepped into the doorway of the café, I would have sworn he was over six feet. And while I find some of this weirdly disappointing, he has an energy that makes me dizzy, as though I had had that glass of wine.

The woman is silent, looks me up and down. She’s like one of those pouty models from a magazine. The kind of person you instantly don’t like on meeting, but stare at anyway just because you’re jealous.

“Returned from the dead,” Ivan whispers, eyeing me as though I were some kind of living apparition. His brows lift. “You changed your hair.”

“Yeah,” I say. It’s weird feeling like your own impostor. Before I can reach up to touch the scrubby patch behind my ear, he tugs me into a tight embrace.