“I’ll be talking to someone,” he said. “You can stay in the room, or go for a walk around the town if you’re up for it. Can you do it?”
She looked around the little room. The dingy carpet, the dented walls. Then she pushed back the covers and got out of bed, one hand holding her stomach beneath the navel.
“I’d been getting ready for this. You know I have been.”
“I know.”
“I want to be the way I was.”
“It’ll be easier if we’re somewhere nice. A couple more days, and then you can go home. Frank Lee’s going to get it cleaned.”
“But will it be safe?”
“A couple more days, and it’ll be safe.”
“You’re getting closer?”
“Yes.”
“Then give me five minutes.”
In the time he’d known Lucy, and especially in the last few months, he’d thought a lot about all the things they’d never done. All the things they might never do. They’d never taken a walk together, or a drive along the coast. They’d never gone to a friend’s house for dinner, never walked into a restaurant together. She’d never held his hand when the lights went down in a movie at a theater, never shouted into his ear to be heard in a club. They survived all right without all those things, their relationship unconstrained within the walls of her house. She played the piano and they read books aloud to each other, and they cooked meals with groceries from her delivery service or ate takeout that he brought from the places she missed the most.
But he regretted everything that had been closed off, and he knew that she did too. He’d seen her standing in the upstairs rooms, where the windows were high enough to look out across some of the other rooftops, into the foreclosed distance. Even her posture spoke of something missing. He had thought she was probably ready for it, had guessed about her secret excursions. But now she was getting it all at once, like jumping from a cliff above deep water. No choice at all about the outcome after her feet left the ground.
They were in Fischer’s car, Lucy in the passenger seat and Cain behind the wheel. They’d passed through the city and now they were on the bridge, the Marin Headlands rising ahead of them.
“This is the last one,” he said. “I have to finish. But after it’s done, then so am I.”
“What are you saying?”
“That we can go anywhere. We can do anything.”
“Okay.”
“You’re staying here for me,” Cain said. “Since we met, that’s what you’ve been doing. But that’s never been fair. So after this, I’m done. We can go wherever you want.”
“Gavin—”
“You had that offer in Lausanne. We could go there.”
“If it’s still open,” she said. “And what would you do in Lausanne? What would you do if you didn’t do this?”
“Whatever it took.”
She took her hand from his knee and pivoted sideways in her seat, leaning against the door handle as she studied his face.
“Let me think about it,” she said.
34
LUCY HAD GONE into Ashbury Heights Elementary one day four years ago to talk to the students about music. She wasn’t a teacher there, didn’t belong in the school at all except that she’d been asked by a friend of a friend to come and give a presentation. It was Career Day; she was supposed to talk about the places she’d traveled, the concerts she’d played. How she had walked alone onto the stages of Europe’s greatest halls, had looked up past the lights and met the eyes of kings and queens. But it didn’t go like that. Half an hour after she’d stepped inside the school, another man had followed. He wasn’t from the city; he had no connections to the school or the children inside it. He had two pistols in his jacket pockets and a backpack full of ammunition. Five minutes later, Lucy was the only adult survivor. Her career as a pianist was at an end. But in four years of exile, giving piano lessons in the home that had become both a refuge and a prison, she hadn’t forgotten the world she’d known.
“What’s the name of the hotel?” she asked.
“It’s just a bed and breakfast.”
“Is it the Palisades?”
“No—I just found it online.”
“Did you pay already?”
“Not yet.”
“Let me have your phone.”
He dug it from his pocket and handed it to her, watching in glances as he steered through the curves. The coastal highway was narrow, and on the left the cliffs dropped all the way down to the ocean. But he could see that Lucy was searching the Internet, and soon she put the phone to her ear.
“It’s still there,” she said to him. “So I’m changing us.”
“All right.”
“You’ll like it.”
Then she was on the line with the desk clerk at the Palisades, and Cain was thinking how easy it would have been to do this months ago. He could have just made the reservation and packed her bag. He could have held her hand going down the front steps to the car, and now, looking at her sitting there, he knew she would have done it gladly. But this wasn’t the right way. Now they were running away from the man who’d broken into her house, and Cain was working on a case. He should have brought her for the simple sake of going. It would have been so easy, and yet he’d never thought of it.