I’m not sure how much time passes. An hour. Two. Three. We stop again, and Elijah lays me down in a field while he picks figs and wild cress for us to eat. Then he lifts me again, and I close my eyes, gently jostled by the motion of walking, drifting in and out of sleep.
The nightmare comes for me again, even in broad daylight, brazen now.
The monster gnaws at my side, and I struggle to get away, but my arms won’t move, I’m trapped in his jaws as he chews and chews. A man stands to the side, holding the leash of the monster. “Why do men usually take beautiful women?” he asks.
Something brings me back to alertness.
“Thank God,” the same man says.
We’re walking through a field, the stalks of something gold high enough to brush my feet as we pass. There’s a small house up ahead. The front door opens, and a man steps onto the dirt. He’s holding a shotgun. “Qui es-tu il demande?” he asks.
“My wife,” Elijah says. “Ma femme. She’s sick. Help.”
The man does not look convinced. He holds the shotgun like a man well versed in shooting it. Weather and years have drawn deep lines into his face.
Then Elijah says, his voice more succinct, “L’aube arrive plus tôt chaque jour.”
My drowsy mind struggles to interpret something about the dawn and its early arrival each day. Why is he telling that to a stranger?
A woman steps out. She slaps her hand on the man’s arm, clearly unimpressed with his hold on the shotgun, and says something rapid-fire in French. “La nuit tombe plus tard chaque jour.”
My tired mind struggles to make sense of the words with my rudimentary travel-dictionary French. The night arrives later each day. But her gesture is unmistakable.
Come in, the wave of her arm says, you’re safe here. You can rest.
Relief is enough to send a fresh wave of tears down my cheeks. We’re ushered into a modest home with an old flower-patterned couch. I’m laid there while the woman fetches tea. The hot liquid slides down my throat like a life force, replenishing me. Elijah spins a story about how we were picked up at the airport by an Uber that ended up being a fake, and taken at gunpoint to the country, where we were left behind, all of our luggage and money stolen.
The man offers to call the cops for us. La police.
My stomach clenches. There’s no reason the police can’t help. Adam kidnapped me. Of course we should file a report. Except some instinct warns me that it’s dangerous.
“No,” Elijah says. “They’re long gone by now, and I’m sure their license was fake. We’ll never get our things back, but my brother can help.”
An old cell phone appears, battered, with the screen cracked. We all remain in the small room that appears to serve as the dining room, living room, and kitchen.
He dials a number by heart. “Hello? It’s Elijah. Yeah, we ran into some trouble on our honeymoon. Holly’s a little banged up. We both need some new identification.”
“My sister,” I whisper.
Elijah glances at me, then continues speaking. “Also, can you check in with Holly’s sister? Yeah, London must be worried sick. Remember, her maiden name’s Frank.”
I meet his green, green eyes. “Thank you,” I say, eyes welling with tears again. I’ve become a watering pot. Exhaustion has brought every emotion to the surface. Fear, grief, worry, along with relief, elation, and a very unfortunate growing affection for the man beside me. I care about him more than I should. I understood what he really meant at the lake…
He did save me, but he didn’t want to.
He does care about me, but he doesn’t want to.
He may help me, but he’s making no promises.
“We found some people who are helping us,” he says, continuing to speak to his brother. “Let me hand the phone over and you can get the address.”
The man speaks a mixture of French and broken English on the phone.
The words nuit and jour float around in my head. Night and day. A code, my mind whispers. It’s as if they were exchanging a code.
It occurs to me that Elijah spoke a beautiful, fluent form of French when we were in the church. Now, in front of the couple, it’s choppy and Americanized. That must be part of our disguise as honeymooners. Every part of him is calculated. That’s what he means by deep cover. I wonder how much of him is truth. Maybe he doesn’t even know the answer.
I whisper to him when the woman bustles at the stove, making something with bread and cheese for us. “Why didn’t you call your lieutenant colonel?”
“I made my choice,” he murmurs back. “And I chose you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Elijah
I’ve made the wrong choice.
Every part of my upbringing, every second of my training. Every cell in my body is certain that I should have hardened my heart to Holly Frank. Let her be raped or beaten. Or killed. It wouldn’t be my fault. I wasn’t the one who kidnapped her. I should have finished my mission.
Even calling my brother was a shot in the dark. We aren’t what you’d call a close family. They took care of me as much as they could when they were home, stealing food when the pantry was empty, finding blankets when the gas turned off. But they were enlisted as soon as they could and never came back. They weren’t there the final two years with our father.
They weren’t there when I finally killed him and got justice for our mother.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s wrong that I’m taking the hospitality of these nice people and pretending that Holly’s my wife, but in these stolen moments it feels right.
The woman shows us upstairs to a small room with a quilted bedspread and an ancient, scarred dresser. The master bedroom, I understand. This is where the farmer and his wife sleep.
Some long-dormant manners remind me to object. We shouldn’t displace them. The sofa will be fine. Or even the barn with a pile of straw. Hell, in my job sleeping in the field is a luxury sometimes. But then I look down at Holly’s face, her delicate nose with its smattering of freckles, her full lips with their tempting peach color, and I know she needs this bed. I’ve seen men die on marches like the one she was just forced to endure.
The heart stops.
It’s a miracle she lived. A miracle I never deserved. So I lay her down on the bedspread, where she closes her eyes, immediately asleep. Then I climb in beside her, gather her still body close as if I can ward away death, and sink deeply into dreams.
There are vicious mermaids and dragons in my sleep.
And a war that both sides are destined to lose.
* * *
When I wake, deep night has settled over the house. I glance out the scalloped pink curtains to the moon. It illuminates a wide, empty field. It’s unlikely Adam could track us this far, but possible. Which damns me for taking these people’s hospitality.
There’s a bathroom adjacent to this room, with black-and-white tile and a claw-foot tub. I start the faucet and fill it halfway with steaming water. Then I return to Holly, who’s still deeply asleep. I pull her clothes off gently, careful with the wound at her side, wincing at the bloody mass of her feet. Her body feels impossibly slight in my arms, far too small for a whole, healthy person.
I place her in the water, and she startles awake, gasping.