All those years, and she’d never been able to see inside him. Violence, intimate violence, was a kind of bond. He’d been the most important person in her life for so long, and still, she’d never understood him. She didn’t know if he’d grieved his mother, if he’d been capable of such grief, and the love it demands. All she knew was his anger, and his fear.

“This will sound strange, but I’d never put the pieces together before. The way I was living then—that kind of stress slows you down, makes you miss things. When I heard how she’d died I understood. She was me. And I realized I’d never even known her first name. So I asked him.”

Her lips were dry as she spoke. “He looked at me like it was the strangest question, like it … like it was irrelevant. And he shrugged. He stood there, holding the telegram in his hand, and he shrugged. He asked me what it mattered, and he put on his jacket, and went to his club like it was any other day. I don’t know whether he remembered it or not. She looked like him, him and his brother, and I still don’t know if he knew her first name. And I knew if I stayed, it would be me. And no one would remember my name.”

She paused, trying to pull some of the necessary detachment back. “It took me another six years. Secretly I started writing for a small expat paper in Paris, a short column on design under a pen name. Alain liked his houses to be at the very height of fashion, so I’d become quite good at interior decoration, and to my surprise, I found I liked it—both the design itself and the writing. Eventually the little column became bigger, and I started writing for larger papers. I put the little bits I made from the columns away, and after a few years I had enough for my own apartment. And I left.”

She looked up from the table, saw the grief and pain and rage in Sam’s eyes, and for a half-second she lost herself in it.

“I know you don’t want pity,” he said. “So I won’t offer it. But Alva, know this. The world is so much better with your name in it.”

She gasped. She didn’t see it coming. His words hit her in the stomach and simply robbed her of breath. When she held a hand up, it was trembling.

“No more, Sam. I can’t.”

He met her eyes and nodded.