I know what you did, Merrow Shawe.
All that you have, I can take away.
INSIDE, AFTER TOASTSwere given, after Rosalie and Wayne Langford and their posh, silver-haired friends hugged and kissed Will and me and wished us well, the band switched from the toothless jazz it had been playing throughout the evening to music we could really dance to. I moved through the house, turning down the lights, leaving a blur of candles in my wake. The rooms grew warm. When someone passed me a drink, the glass was so beaded with sweat that it nearly slipped from my hand. A caterer refreshed the rapidly melting ice in the raw bar, each piece a glittering, diminishing diamond in the candlelight. Most of the men had shed their suit jackets; a few women had already taken off their heels. I flung open the windows, as I often did late at night. I liked how quickly the salt air seeped in, making the dark floors gleam like tide pools below the moon.
I was only dancing by myself for a moment or two when Will found me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he murmured in my ear.
A loud crash interrupted us.
In the dining room, the tiers of the giant raw bar had toppled over. Oyster shells and ice cubes spun across the floor. Caterers rushed from the kitchen with trash bags and brooms and kitchen towels and I knelt to help, the wet floor cold beneath my bare knees. I moved a towel over the floor and when I lifted it I was jolted by memory.
A lifeless weight in my arms; blood, not water, soaking through my clothes; in my chest, rage rising from grief like a flame from kindling.
I dropped the sodden towel to the floor and stood, swaying and desperate for air. Nearby, a caterer filled a trash bag with soiled ice and oysters.
“I’ll take that,” I said, ignoring his protest as I grabbed the bag and hurried toward the door to the garage.
ISET THEgarbage in the bin and replaced the lid. Then I opened the garage door and stepped onto the sidewalk.
Above San Francisco, the stars were always small. I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to this. I breathed in the air, feeling the city moving around me. I thought of the kids I worked with at Learning Together and wondered if the noises of the city floated through their dreams. It was hard for me to imagine a childhood here, below stars that did not insist you look up with wonder.
I had hoped that a party would solidify my hold in this place, but all it had taken to summon the past was the weight of a wet rag.
When I looked down from the sky, he was walking toward me. At first, I felt annoyed. I’d had too much to drink; my mind was playing tricks; of course it was not him. I had seen him so many times over the previous nine years... everywhere Will and I traveled, I saw him... only to be wrong.
But now...
If this was him, a powerful new silhouette had swallowed his wiry body. He moved in a new way, too, gliding from the shadows with confidence. His beautiful dark hair was shorn close to his scalp.
And then he was before me, and I saw the silver scar near his temple, as pale as a sliver of winter sky. Up close, the boy he had been at sixteen was no longer hidden in his face.
“Merrow,” Amir said, and the sound of my name in his voice made me feel as though he were rousing me from a long sleep, whispering “fire.”
