Chapter 28
The Quiet After
The sun came up over Coldwater Point as if nothing had happened.
It rose out of the sea at ten to six, round and pink and enormous, and laid a long road of light across the water to the foot of the cannery. The fog was gone. The air was washed and cool and smelled of salt and wet ash. Along the quay, where a night before there had been flares and fire, the stones were black and slick and strewn with brass; a dozen small fires smoldered among the wreckage of the trucks, sending up thin gray strings of smoke that rose straight into the windless sky. Gulls had come. They walked about on the cobbles, picking among the debris, and sat on the rails in rows, and cried.
Damen sat on a bollard at the end of the quay with his hands between his knees.
He did not know how long he had been there. Someone had put a blanket over his shoulders. Someone had put a mug of tea in his hand, hot and sweet, and he had drunk it and been given another. His left wrist had been reset by a man in a fisherman's jersey, who was, it appeared, a veterinarian, and who had said briskly that it was a nasty break and he'd done worse on a Clydesdale. His throat had been bandaged. His boots had been taken off. He sat in his stocking feet on the iron cap of a mooring post with a gray blanket round his neck and his eyes on the water, and for the first time in four days, nobody was shooting at him.
It was very quiet.
The battle had lasted forty minutes. By one in the morning it was over. Varga's men had taken the quay and the boat house and the crane; Mercer's, with their commander on his back in a stone hall and their employer dead in a tower, had lost interest. Some had run. Some had surrendered, with their hands on their heads, to a roomful of enormous Hungarians who stood over them with lobster gaffs and an air of pained disapproval. Eleven of Varga's own people lay in a row on the quay, under tarpaulins, with their boots sticking out. He had been over them one by one. He had known none of them. He had made himself look at every face.
"You are brooding," said Marta Szabo.
She was sitting beside him on the next bollard, in her veil, with her hands folded in her lap and the black Cadillac idling behind her. She had a flask of brandy. She passed it, without looking round, and he drank, and it burned.
"I'm counting."
"Do not."
"Eleven of Dom's. Seven of Mercer's on the stair. Eleven at the warehouse. Four in the house." He swallowed. "Teddy. Cody."
"And Mercer."
"I didn't do Mercer."
"No," said Marta, "you did not. Your wife did. I wonder whether you have asked her how she is."
He was silent.
"She will want to be asked," said the old woman. "Not tonight. But soon. A woman who has killed her first man does not wish to be told it was necessary. She wishes to be asked what it was like." Her black eyes, under the veil, rested on his face. "And you will tell her the truth. Which is that it is something one carries, and that it grows lighter, but not much."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I've carried thirty-one," said Damen.
"Fifty-four, I think." She said it gently. "If one is counting."
He closed his eyes.
"Do not misunderstand," said Marta. "I am not condemning you. I told you: I have buried more than you have killed. I merely wish you to remember the number." She patted his knee, briskly, once. "It is the only thing that keeps a man honest. Now. Drink your tea. A woman is looking for you."
He had seen his daughters meet at half past one.
He would carry that for the rest of his life. It had happened on the quay among the smoking trucks, in a smell of cordite and fish, with the last flare guttering out over the harbor and a hundred men standing about in the dark with their guns hanging. He had been coming down the tower steps with Ivy's hand in his and Naomi behind him, gray with exhaustion, and he had heard from the water a boy's voice, hoarse, shouting a name; and a thin figure had come running up the length of the quay in a yellow cardigan and a pair of enormous sea boots, with a chart still rolled under one arm and her borrowed glasses hanging from one ear.
She had not stopped running when she saw them.
"Ivy!"
Ivy let go of his hand. She did not say a word. She flung herself down the last three steps and across the cobbles, and the two sisters struck one another in the middle of the quay, hard enough to stagger, and went down together on the wet stones in a heap of arms and braids, Sofi's glasses flying, both of them weeping, both of them laughing, both of them talking at once. You're alive. You're alive. I thought. I counted. I did the five things. I saw you wave. I saw you. I saw you on the dock. He had stood on the step with his hand over his mouth.
And Naomi had walked across the quay.
She had not run. She walked slowly, with her arms at her sides, in the torn cardigan, as one walks into a church, and stopped over the two girls on the ground. She looked down at the elder. Sofi looked up. There was blood on the cardigan sleeve, long dried, and a bruise down one side of her face, and a scrape across her chin, and her gray eyes behind nothing were enormous and bright and wet.
"Mom," she said. "I killed a man."
"I know," said Naomi.
"At the ramp. With the knife Dad gave me. I didn't, I couldn't—"
"I know, baby." Her voice was very low. "So did I."
Sofi stared at her.
"An hour ago," said Naomi. "In a hall. With a needle." She knelt. She did it carefully, on the wet stones, and took her elder daughter's face in both her hands, and held it. "We're going to talk about it. All three of us. For a long time. And it's going to be awful. And I want you to hear me say it now, on this ground, so you never forget." The dark eyes were burning. "You did nothing wrong. You were eighteen and alone and you stayed alive. And I have never been so proud of anyone in my life."
Sofi's face crumpled. She went into her mother's arms like a child, and Naomi held her, rocking, with Ivy's arms round both of them, three heads together in the dark; and Damen, on the tower steps, with the blood of nineteen men on his coat, looked at the one thing in the world he had not been able to protect, and had been given back, and knew that he had not earned it.
"She brought the boats in," said a gruff voice at his elbow.
Dominic Varga had come up beside him, huge and scorched, with a bandage round his head and a shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm. He was looking at the girl on the stones.
"Through the Skerry. In fog. Four boats, with no lights, forty feet from the rocks on either side." He shook his massive head. "I stood in the bow of the second and I could hear the surf. She stood at the wheel of the first with a boy of nineteen and a chart, and she said, starboard ten, and hold, and hold, in a voice like a schoolteacher's, and she brought us through." A pause. "I have fished that coast for forty years. I would not have done it."
"She's good with tides."
"She's good with everything," said Varga, "and she's not yet old enough to be told." He wiped his nose. "She wouldn't let me thank her. She said, you can thank me when I've found my glasses."
Damen laughed. It came out as a cough.
"Keep her away from Millbrook," said Varga, "if you want her alive."
"She's starting there in the fall."
"God help the faculty."
Wren was sitting up on the stretcher in the lee of the hearse, with a gray army blanket round her shoulders and a mug of cocoa in her hands.
She was alone. She looked very small. Someone had cleaned her face, and dressed the wound in her thigh, and put her hair in a clip; there was a bandage on her cheek. She sat with her knees drawn up under the blanket, and watched the sun come up out of the sea, and did not turn her head as he approached. He stopped a few feet away. He stood in his socks on the wet cobbles, in a dead man's suit, with his arms hanging.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello."
"How's the leg?"
"It's a graze." She looked into the mug. "I've had worse from a bicycle."
"You were very brave."
"I wasn't." She said it flatly. "I was frightened for four hours. I counted. That's all I did." A pause. "Is she safe?"
"Yes."
"The little one."
"She's with her mother. In the tower. They're having a cup of cocoa with Mrs. Aldous." He heard his own voice, rusty. "She wants to meet you."
The girl did not answer.
She sat in the pink light with the steam rising from the mug, and the gulls crying, and a faint salt wind stirring the short black hair at her brow. She had grown very still. She was staring at the sea. And after a long time she said, in a small, clear, careful voice, as if reading from a card:
"He's dead. Mr. Strand."
"Yes."
"I saw him once. When I was five. He came to my birthday. He brought a book." She bent her head. "I'd forgotten. I remembered it just now. He sat on the floor, and read to me, and did all the voices. Daddy said, this is your godfather. I called him Uncle Ev. He had a gold watch that he let me hold."
Damen said nothing.
"I never connected him," said Wren. "In nine years. With the, with the man." Her voice shook. "I knew the name Strand. I knew it was the boss. I never once thought of Uncle Ev." She looked up. Her eyes were wet. "Did he know I was alive?"
"He always knew."
"Did he tell you?"
"He told me everything." He knelt. He did it carefully, on one knee, so that his face was level with hers, and looked at her squarely, in the sunrise light. "He told me why he sent me. He told me what your father did. And he told me that he watched you walk into Marta's house every Sunday with a cake for nine years, and that it was the only good thing he'd ever done."
The girl's face crumpled.
It happened slowly. The lips pressed together; the chin shook; the huge dark eyes filled and spilled. She made no sound. She put the mug down on the stretcher, very carefully, and wrapped both arms round her knees, and put her forehead against them, and wept without a word, with her whole slight body shaking under the blanket, in the cold clear pink dawn.
He did not touch her.
He knelt there, a yard away, and waited. The tide turned. The gulls wheeled. After a long time she lifted her head, wiped her face on the blanket, and said, quite calmly:
"I want my father's envelope."
"It's safe. It's in a vault in Port Merrin. An old man named Amos is holding it. He won't give it to anyone but you."
"Good."
"You don't have to open it."
"I know."
"You don't have to do anything."
"I know that too." She picked up her mug. She looked at it. "I'm going to carry it for a while. I think. I'm going to put it in my pocket and walk around with it. And then one day I'll be ready." She drew a breath. "I'm not ready now."
"No."
"I'm still not going to forgive you."
"I know."
"But I'm not going to kill you." The ghost of a smile touched her mouth. "I've decided. It was in the van. I decided somewhere around the part where you cried at the binoculars."
"I didn't—"
"You did." She finished the cocoa. "I watched you. I'm a nurse. I know when someone's about to be sick."
He laughed.
It came out of him unexpectedly, a cracked rusty bark, and he put his hand over his mouth. She looked at him with solemn dark eyes, and then, slowly, with an air of unwilling astonishment, she began to laugh too. It was a small laugh, a thin one, with tears in it. It broke and started again. They knelt and sat there, in the early sun, on the black stones of the quay, a man and a girl who had met in the dark nine years before, and laughed, for no reason, until neither of them could stop.
"Here," said Damen, at last.
He took it from his wrist.
It was a small thing, purple, thin, frayed at one edge. It lay in his palm. She looked at it, and he saw her face change.
"You kept it," she said.
"You said it was worth nothing."
"It isn't." She took it. She held it against her chest. "It's worth everything." And then, very quietly: "Thank you."
"Count slowly," said Damen.
"I always do."
The helicopter came at half past six.
It came in from the north, low over the water, a dark, ugly, noisy machine with the letters FBI on its flank and a long searchlight hanging from its belly. It swung over the headland like a great insect. The gulls rose in a screaming cloud. It hung above the quay, its rotor churning the sea into a spray of white foam, and then it dropped, sidling, onto the concrete, and the door slid open.
A woman got out.
She was small. She was perhaps forty-four, in a gray pantsuit and flat shoes, with a navy windbreaker over it that said FEDERAL AGENT in yellow, and a short helmet of dark hair, and a face like a firm, plain, intelligent walnut. She carried a briefcase. She stood on the quay in the roar of the rotors with her hair blown flat, looking round her at the burnt trucks, the bodies under the tarpaulins, the gulls, the gray stones, and the mouth in the walnut face drew itself into a thin straight line.
Behind her, in twos and threes, came others. Men in windbreakers. Men in helmets. A tall black man in a black suit with a clipboard. A dozen state troopers in gray, with a captain at their head, an old stooped man with a face like a hatchet. They spread out along the quay. They stood about in the smoke, and they did not draw their guns.
The woman crossed the concrete.
She walked straight up to the bollard where the tall, bareheaded, gray-bearded man sat in his stocking feet, and stopped in front of him. She looked at him for a good while. She looked at the bandaged throat, the splinted wrist, the long scar on the forearm that showed from under the blanket. Her eyes were brown. They were direct and unsurprised and a little tired.
"Mr. Knox," she said.
"Yes."
"Ana Ruiz." She did not offer her hand. "I believe you sent me a present."
"I did."
"It arrived at nine-fourteen yesterday morning, in four hundred and eleven images, on my personal cell. I was in a meeting with the Deputy Attorney General." She spoke in a flat, dry, rapid voice, like a woman reciting a grocery list. "I excused myself. I looked at it in the ladies' room. I sat on the lid of a toilet for twenty minutes, Mr. Knox, reading the name of the Bishop of Port Merrin, and then I went back in and said I would need a plane."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I've been waiting nine years." She set the briefcase down. "Martin Calder rang me on a Thursday in August 2016. He said, I have something. He said he would bring it on Monday. He never came." The brown eyes did not move from his face. "I've spent nine years wondering who killed him."
"I did."
She said nothing.
"On the twelfth of August 2016, at ten past one in the morning, I shot Martin Calder in the back of the head in his study on Lake Orrin. I was paid for it. I was ordered to do it by Everett Strand." He said it clearly, in a level voice, like a man reading out a plea. "I have killed thirty-one men for the Meridian Harbor Group in the course of eleven years. I can give you names, dates, locations, and the make of the weapon. I can give you most of the sums. I'm prepared to testify against every person on the list in that book. I'm prepared to say it in open court."
Ruiz did not move.
"Before you read me my rights," said Damen, "I'd like to ask one thing."
"Ask."
"My wife and daughter are in the tower. Neither of them knew. Neither of them ever took a penny. My wife saved a boy's life, and mine, and the girl's, and a man's I would not have saved." He drew a breath. "Whatever you do to me, I want them out of it. I want them kept safe. I want a house, and a name, and nobody on the doorstep."
"That can be arranged."
"And the girl. Wren Calder. She's nineteen. She's Martin's daughter. She's the reason you have your book. She walked into that building with a bread knife because a twelve-year-old waved at her."
"I know who she is." The voice softened, very slightly. "I've known for nine years. I had a file. It said she died in a fire." A pause. "Then at eight this morning a woman named Szabo walked up to my helicopter and handed me a funeral director's card. It said, She did not."
"Marta."
"She gave me forty-six minutes of dictation in Hungarian-accented English. I took it down." Ruiz shook her head. "She is, I think, the most alarming person I have ever met."
"Yes."
"I'll arrest you, Mr. Knox."
"I know."
"Not for the thirty-one." She said it slowly. "We'll come to those. There'll be a grand jury, and a good many lawyers. It will be a year. Perhaps two. You'll plead to something. You'll cooperate, in full, and you'll serve a sentence, because you cannot be told you did not do it, and I'd be the first to say so." The brown eyes were steady. "But I will tell you what I am prepared to say in front of a judge. That the man who killed Martin Calder also, nine years ago, on the same night, did the single thing that made it possible for me to be standing here. He left a child alive. He took her out of that house and gave her to a woman who raised her. That is not a defense. But it is not nothing."
"No."
"I'll say it."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me." She picked up her briefcase. "You've got a little girl. I've seen her. She's sitting at the foot of that tower with a notebook, counting my troopers. She's got it up to thirty-one." A faint dry smile. "I thought you'd want to know."
He looked up.
Across the quay, on a bollard by the tower door, in a pink sweater with a rabbit on it, a small girl sat with her boots dangling and a pencil in her fist, writing. A tall pale woman in a gray cardigan stood beside her, holding a blanket. A young man in a black jacket, with a swallow on his hand, stood three paces off with his back to a wall, white as paper, and a hand on his shoulder belonging to an old woman in a gray uniform.
They're all right, he thought.
They're all still here.
"Mr. Knox," said Ruiz.
"Yes."
"Put your boots on. It's a long way to Washington."
They held Teddy's funeral on the Friday.
It was in the chapel at the back of Szabo & Daughters, a small whitewashed room with a plank floor and a plain oak bier, and it was full. They had not expected that. Marta had thought there would be six. She had put out twenty chairs. She stood at the door in her black dress and her veil, and watched them come: the barmaid from the Anchor Tavern, with her hat in her hand; a priest; three old men in leather jackets; a dozen mechanics from the Docks, in clean overalls, with their hands scrubbed raw; a woman who had owned a diner. A plumber. A bus driver who said that he had been in the Stacks on Tuesday and that it was the finest piece of driving he had ever witnessed in his life. Dominic Varga came with his remaining men, forty-one of them, in black suits, with their hats in their hands. They filled the pews, and the aisles, and stood in the yard outside in the rain.
Joey sat in the front row in a borrowed suit.
He did not cry. He had cried for three days. He sat very straight, with his black curls combed down and his hands on his knees, and he looked at the oak box with an expression of such enormous, stunned, puzzled tenderness that more than one woman in the pews had to look away. Beside him, on one side, sat Wren, on crutches, in a gray dress. On the other sat a tall man in a black suit, with a bandage at his throat, and, between him and the aisle, two girls: a small one in a blue dress with her hand in his, and a tall one in a borrowed black coat, with thick glasses, who held the other's hand and did not let go.
The priest said what priests say.
Then Dominic Varga rose.
He stood at the head of the aisle in his black suit, a vast, scarred, solemn figure, turning his hat in his hands. He cleared his throat. He looked at the coffin for a while. And then he said, in a deep gruff voice that cracked on every other syllable, "I cannot make a speech."
Nobody said a word.
"I was a customer of his. Thirty years. He cut my hair when I was nine. He fixed my first car, and my second, and my third, and never sent a bill." He wiped his nose. "My brother Andrei used to say that the only honest man in the Docks was a fat mechanic with a Johnny Cash poster. I thought he was joking. I did not know. I did not know till Tuesday." He turned. "Joey. Your father drove through a steel door at ninety miles an hour so that a man could go and get you. I have been in this business forty years and I have never seen a braver thing."
Joey closed his eyes.
"If you ever need anything," said Varga. "A job. A bed. A man to hit someone. You come to me." His voice dropped. "That's not a favor. It's a debt. The Varga family pays what it owes."
He sat down.
Marta wept. She did it silently, behind her veil. And from the back of the chapel, in the silence, a small voice said, quite clearly, "Dad? Can I say something?"
"Yes."
Ivy stood.
She walked down the aisle in her blue dress and her yellow boots, with her braids over her shoulders, small and straight and solemn, and a hundred people turned to watch. She stopped in front of the coffin. She looked at it. She put out one finger and touched the lid, lightly, as one touches a thing that is warm.
"I didn't know him," she said. "I only met him once. He was in a diner and I was at the library. Dad told me about him afterwards." She took a breath. "I wrote five things down. I'd like to read them."
She opened her notebook.
"One. He drove very well. Two. He had a big laugh. Three. He wore a Hawaiian shirt even when it was cold." Her voice was perfectly steady. "Four. He loved his boy. Five..." She hesitated. For the first time, the voice wavered. "Five. Dad cried when he told me about him. And Dad doesn't cry. So he must have been a very good person."
She closed the book.
"That's all," she said. "I noticed."
She turned and walked back up the aisle, and sat down, and took her father's hand. And the chapel was so silent that you could hear the rain on the roof, and the soft tick of the old brass clock on Marta's mantel, and, from the front row, a long, shuddering, broken sound, like the sound of a boy at last allowed to weep.
They talked, in the end, on a Sunday night.
It was in a rented farmhouse in the hills outside Millbrook, which Ruiz had found for them under another name, with a deputy U.S. marshal in a car at the end of the lane and two more in the barn. It was a plain, comfortable, ugly house with a sagging porch and a big kitchen. A fire burned in the range. Ivy was asleep upstairs, in a bed with a quilt, with the door open a hand's breadth and the nightlight on. And in the kitchen, at a scarred pine table, in the yellow lamplight, Damen sat with his hands wrapped round a cup of tea and waited for his wife to speak.
She had not spoken for half an hour.
She sat opposite him, in a gray sweater, with her hair loose, and looked at the table. She had washed. She had slept. She had cut her hand on a plate and bandaged it herself. She was very pale, and calm, and there were shadows under her eyes like thumbprints. A clock ticked, an ordinary one, on the wall above the sink.
"I killed a man," said Naomi.
"Yes."
"I want to say it. Out loud. Without anything attached." Her voice was low. "I put a needle in the neck of a man named Cassian Mercer, and he died on a stone floor, forty seconds later, with his eyes open. I knew exactly what I was doing. I'd have done it again."
"Yes."
"I've sat with six hundred dying people." She did not look up. "I held their hands. I was proud of it. I thought, I am the one who stays. I never once thought, I could be the one who sends them."
"It wasn't—"
"Don't say it wasn't my fault."
He closed his mouth.
"I'm not asking you to excuse it. I'm telling you what it is." She raised her eyes. They were dark and steady and very clear. "I wanted you to know that I understand. Now. I thought I understood before. I didn't. I thought it was a kind of illness. A thing that happened to you. A weather." A faint smile. "It isn't. It's a choice. You make it, and then you live in the room you've made."
"Naomi."
"You did it thirty-one times."
"Fifty-four."
"Fifty-four." She absorbed it, silently. "And I did it once, and I can't sleep." She shook her head. "I don't know how you walk."
"I don't," said Damen. "Not really. I counted. I stood on a quay with a blanket on and counted, and I thought, this is the last number. And then I remembered that it isn't. It's the first." He turned the cup. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life saying the names."
"Will it help?"
"No."
"Then why—"
"Because the other thing is not saying them."
She was silent.
The fire shifted in the range. A moth hit the window, softly, and clung. In the quiet, a long way off, an owl began, and was answered; and Damen, looking at his wife across the lamplit table, thought: she is going to leave. He thought: she is going to stand up, and put on her coat, and walk out of that door with our daughter. He thought it calmly, as one thinks of a tide. He found that he was ready for it. He found that he would not stop her.
"Here is what I want," said Naomi.
"Yes."
"No more rooms."
"What?"
"No locked rooms. No drawers. No sheds with a lead lining." She laid her hands flat on the table. "I'm married to a man whose name I didn't know. I've lived twenty years with a stranger, and loved him, and I'd do it again. But I won't do it for the next thirty. If there's something, I'll hear it. If there's a man, I'll be told. If there's a gun, it's on the table, where Ivy can see it, and we'll decide together." Her voice shook, and steadied. "That's all. That's the whole of the price."
"That's nothing."
"It's everything." The ghost of a smile touched her mouth. "It's a great deal harder than you think."
"I'll try."
"You'll do it. You're a very patient man." She reached across the table. She took his hand, in both of hers, and held it, hard. "I was angry with you on the dock. I was angry in the van, and the room, and the whole four days. I'm still angry. I think I'll be angry for a long time." She lifted his hand and laid it against her cheek. "But you came. And I haven't stopped being glad."
He could not speak.
He sat quite still, with his hand against her face, and the tears running down his own, openly, without shame, into the stubble. The fire crackled. The clock ticked. And upstairs, in the dark, in a bed under a quilt, a small voice said sleepily, through the open door, to nobody, to the house:
"Five things."
"Go to sleep, Ivy," called Naomi.
"One. Mama's happy. Two. Dad's crying. Three, the clock's right." A pause. "Four, it's raining. Five..."
They waited.
"Five, I'm not scared."
Rosa Delgado arrived on Monday morning, in a taxi, with a covered dish.
She was seventy-one. She was small and brown and round, in a black cardigan and a flowered dress, with a gray braid pinned at the back of her head and a face as soft and lined as a walnut. She got down from the cab with a great deal of fuss, paying the driver in exact change, and stood in the lane in front of the farmhouse with her handbag on her arm and the dish in both hands, blinking against the sun. The marshals looked at her. The marshals looked at one another. One of them stepped forward to ask her business, and she said, "I am the grandmother," and walked past him, and up the steps, and into the house.
"Mama!"
Naomi ran.
She ran across the kitchen in her bare feet and flung herself on the little round figure, and the dish fell, and nobody noticed; and the old woman held her. She held her with both arms, fiercely, rocking, murmuring in Spanish, stroking her hair. She said, mija, mija, mi niña. She said, you are so thin. She said, I made the pork ones. And over her daughter's shoulder, her eyes, dark, mild, and very bright, found Damen in the doorway, and rested on his face.
It lasted only a moment.
It was a thing he would think about afterward for a long time. There was nothing in it. There was no meaning. She looked at him as a mother-in-law looks at a son-in-law across a kitchen, with warmth, and relief, and a faint shy amusement at the state of his hair. She smiled. It was a wide, sweet, dimpled smile.
"Dean," she said. "You look dreadful."
"Hello, Rosa."
"You have been through the war." She drew back, patting Naomi's cheek. "You must eat. All of you. I will warm it." She bent for the dish, and picked it up from the floor, miraculously whole, and bore it to the range. "The little one? Where is she?"
"Upstairs."
"Ay. Let me look at her." She hurried toward the stair. At the foot of it she paused, with her hand on the rail. She turned her head. "Naomi."
"Yes, Mama?"
"That man with the clock." The voice was gentle. "They told me on the radio. He died, eh? In his tower."
"Yes."
"Did he say anything?"
Naomi hesitated.
It was a fraction of a second. A flicker. She stood in the center of the kitchen with her arms at her sides and her hair in her face, and a small crease came between her brows, as if she were trying to remember a dream. "He said... something," she said slowly. "At the end. He said, tell Rosa."
"Tell Rosa?"
"I don't know why. I thought it was odd."
"Ah," said Rosa Delgado.
She stood on the bottom step with her hand on the rail and her face turned up toward the landing, where a small girl was already tumbling out of a bedroom in a pink nightgown, shrieking Abuela! She did not move. Her face was quite calm. It was soft and kind and tired and old, and there was nothing in it at all, nothing that Damen could see, except a single quiet flash of something in the dark eyes, small and bright and far back, like a coin at the bottom of a well.
"It was a long time ago," she said. "We knew each other once. In the old days. In Port Merrin." She smiled. "He was a gentleman."
"You never told me."
"Mija, I never tell you anything. I am an old woman. I have a great many secrets." She laughed, a rich, rolling, comfortable laugh, and held out her arms to the child. "Come here, my darling. Come to Abuela. Tell me everything."
Ivy flew down the stair.
And Damen stood in the doorway of the kitchen, in the warm smell of tamales and woodsmoke and coffee, with his wife's hand in his, and watched his daughter hurled into the arms of an old woman in a flowered dress.
It was a long time ago.
We knew each other once.
He looked at the dark gray braid. He looked at the little round hands. He looked at the face above them, soft and lined and loving, bent to the child's, and a very small cold finger, like a drop of water, ran down the whole length of his spine.
Don't, said the voice.
It's nothing.
It's a common name.