He steps away, and I brush past him.

Five minutes later we’re heading down the street after a quick stop at the tourist agency to book ferry passes. We grab sandwiches at an outdoor café—cheese and tomato baguettes that would be considered understuffed by American standards—and take them down to the water to eat. A breeze is blowing in from the ocean, and though it isn’t cold, it’s bracing enough to remind me that I’m alive. Right now, for this moment. And I’m ravenous. Impossibly, I eat the entire thing, wash it down with a bottle of Fanta.

“Cres island, you said?” Luka asks. I nod. “That doesn’t make sense. The Progeny don’t usually hide in underpopulated areas.”

“He called himself a hermit, but he’s Progeny. I could feel him coming a block away.”

Luka frowns as we walk up the road past several small boutiques toward some larger hotels. It feels good to move, to lengthen my stride and walk—fast. Despite the fatigue and drain of the last several days, I suddenly feel like I could run.

“You need to burn,” Luka says, his long legs keeping up easily with mine.

“What?”

“Some energy. You’re amped. But we don’t have time or gear to swim.” He looks around.

“Is that what I used to do?” I say. My mind is instantly back in Maine the morning I woke with damp hair. Is that what I was doing? The reason I swam to retrieve the cross from the truck instead of taking the johnboat?

“Anytime you could.”

We near the driveway of a boutique hotel. From the sidewalk I can see the swimming pool with the broad dining deck looking right out over the ocean.

“There,” Luka says, pointing to a taxi preparing to pull in.

“What?”

“The doorman called that cab for a guest. Get him to take us instead.”

A minute later we’re in the back of the cab and the edge is off. We ride the twenty minutes to Rijeka past magnificent homes facing the water with gates of climbing vines, window boxes full of flowers.

I think back again to the way Ivan and the others looked at me, as though I were the ghost of my mother. Recall what Ivan said about forgetting who I am and wonder how I’m ever supposed to remember in the shadow of her dubious celebrity.

And I can’t stop hearing Claudia’s statement that it might be better if I had truly died.

The ferry landing in the port city of Rijeka is a curving stretch of road. By the time we arrive, it is filled with cars lined all the way up the hill so far that we can’t even see the ferry itself. Farther down, several people have gotten out of their vehicles.