“I don’t even really know,” he said. “It was dark, and I’m surprised—and they are surprised—and at first I don’t even recognize them, and then they break apart, and it’s clear that they were doing something they shouldn’t, and I apologize and try to get the hell out of there as fast as I can, but the damage is done. On the way out, I bump into Simon, who is looking for them, and he knows—I can just tell that he knows—and I get out of the way before he finds them, but I’m still in the cave when the shouting starts. It echoes back, you know? I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but yeah. That was it. That was the end of the holiday, pretty much. The next day everyone was pissed off and quiet. Simon wrecked his Jet Ski. And in the end we all just went home. In a heartbeat, it was all over. I was amazed when I heard from Simon a month or so later, more so when he talked about seeing Brad. I figured they had all worked it out, that it was just some vacation flirtation that got out of hand, and it was all done and mended. But I also figured Kristen knew. I guess not.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so for a moment we just sat there. Was I surprised? Not really. Melissa flirted with everyone. It was her basic mode of being. She made people love her, or at least she made them want to be around her. Like that kid at the restaurant. Waiter boy. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, but he positively swooned over her, and we went back time and time again because she liked it. Was I surprised that she had had a bit of a thing with Brad? That it seemed to have gone further than flirting? No. I was only surprised that she had been caught. Mel was careful, and she usually walked a fine line between playfulness and anything that might spark real jealousy in Simon. Maybe Brad had forced the issue. That seemed possible. He still seemed to watch her with a kind of fascination. Maybe that was why no one had told Kristen. Because it wasn’t really over. The incident was past and everyone had moved on, but who knew what the hell Brad thought—felt—in his heart of hearts? Kristen deserved better.

Not that my opinion mattered.

“What was Plato’s myth of the cave?” I said.

“Not really a myth, more a metaphor,” said Marcus. “The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”

“Huh,” I said, remembering. I try to decide if it’s relevant to what I’ve just been told and decide it isn’t.

“We should go back in,” he said.

“Yeah. You know, Marcus, that was very professorial of you just now. The Plato bit, I mean.”

“Ha. Is that a compliment?”

“Well, I know you don’t like being called professor, so . . .”

“I don’t mind it from you,” he said.

I smiled up at him and almost—almost—went to kiss him. For his part, he dithered as only Marcus can and then haltingly started to walk back to the house, each step closing our window of opportunity a fraction till we were back and had to be part of the group once more.

I thought of that window for the rest of the night, wondering if it was steadily closing as the week came to an end. I didn’t know why the possibility of getting back together with Marcus seemed more likely in Crete than it did in Charlotte, where we both lived, but it did, as if the foreignness of the place, its ancient monuments, glorious scenery, and storied towns made everything more exotic, more alive with possibility. Here, I was vacation Jan, not the Great Deal flow team leader who had so disappointed her friends. It also occurred to me that Marcus was looking better to me here too. I didn’t come back intending to rekindle those old, long burned-out fires. Being here had made me consider the possibility.

I wondered if that last part was true or if I was still lying to myself, if I came expressly to be with him and take him home to my apartment like some souvenir statue.

I snorted to myself, and Simon shot me a look as if he thought I was laughing at him, so I smiled and chatted until it was time to go up to bed, and I made a point of not looking at Marcus while Gretchen hung on his every word, of keeping my good night to him brief and nonchalant, even as I felt the window closing a little more, so that there was only a crack of light above the sill. I was considering this overwrought metaphor in my room when the screaming started.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“You said the first lie you told was about your sister,” said Chad. “Any idea why that would be?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, it was a long time ago. I don’t remember. I just liked the idea of having a sister.”

He considered me in that shrewd way of his that was almost mockingly smug. I didn’t like it. I liked it when he listened to me. He was a good listener, and that, in a weird kind of way, was sexy. But his appraising, therapist watchfulness got old fast. He reached for a folder and flicked it open.

“But you did have a sister, didn’t you?” he said.

I sat very still. I had not seen that folder before.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“Gabriella,” he read aloud. “Two years younger than you. Yes? Jan?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And you’ve never mentioned her before.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” I said. “She died a long time ago.”

“In a car accident,” he said, consulting his notes, as if just spotting the detail for the first time. “With your mother.”

I wanted to be somewhere else now, but the longer I sat there, the steadier his gaze became. I considered getting up, screaming some outrage about his nerve in requesting my old medical records, then storming out and never coming back.

“Jan?” he prompted.

“Yes,” I said.

“Your mother and sister both died in a car accident when you were ten.”

“Yes.”

“And your father . . . ?”

“I never knew him. After my mother died I was raised by my grandmother till I went away to school.”

“That must have been very hard.”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, in some ways, I guess. But it was OK.”

I don’t know why I am thinking about this now. To take my mind off my situation, I guess.

My situation.

It’s a grotesquely inadequate phrase.

The pain in my hand is so great that I have to feel to make sure it is still there, that I didn’t just tear it out at the root, like the chimp, leaving the hand lodged in the manacle on the wall while I sit here bleeding to death from my ravaged wrist. But it’s still attached, though I can barely touch it to be sure.

The brutal surgery had been about as simple and rough as I could imagine. I had just pulled—yanked, really—till enough bones broke that I could drag what was left out of the manacle cuff. It took all my strength, and now I’m horrified by the results. I can move my fingers, just, but my thumb is badly dislocated and probably broken. It hangs loose, resting at a distressing right angle to my palm. It hasn’t bled as much as I thought it would, but the skin around my knuckles and the heel of my hand where the damage to the thumb begins has been peeled away. The muscle beneath feels smooth and soft as raw chicken breast.

I have found the sandal I threw away and now sit there beside it in the dark, clutching my broken hand to my breast, waiting for the pain to subside and wondering why now, of all times, my desperate mind keeps straying back to my dead sister.

And Mom.

My memories of her are astonishingly brief and few. I have photographs that I used to get out from time to time in an effort to remember more, but the pictures have eaten all other memories, like the last fat fish in the tank, so that now all I can remember are the pictures. A couple of decades later I still weep for her, but I don’t know what exactly it is that I’m missing, and it is the idea of the loss itself that drives my grief. Of my sister Gabby, there is even less.

I sit there, listening to my breathing, trying to decide if the pain in my useless hand is subsiding, and I decide eventually that it isn’t. I’m going to have to function without it. I did this to myself to get free. It was crazy not to use that freedom now that I had it.

I get unsteadily to my feet, wonder briefly if there might be any use in holding on to the sandal, and decide there isn’t. Too flimsy to use as a weapon. Even considering that is alarming, and as I move quietly to the door, I find myself wondering with a new and different dread if I am going to have to fight my way out.

“Where were you when the accident happened?” asks Chad in my head.

Not now, I say to myself. I don’t want to do this now. I can’t. It’s not relevant.

“Are you sure it’s not relevant?” says Chad, and this is not memory anymore. He’s in my head talking to me now.

“I was at school,” I say, the words actually coming out in a rough whisper.

Stop thinking about this, I insist to myself.

I am at the door now. I don’t think it is locked. I have been trying to escape for what feels like hours, trying to get away from a man who will certainly kill me if he finds I have gotten out of the manacle.

Focus!

The door is cold to the touch, solid and wooden. I hold my crippled left hand behind me and reach for the handle with my right. There’s a metal latch, the kind with a lever you press with your thumb while pulling the handle.

It will make noise.

No, I think. It won’t.

He has come in twice now, and I didn’t hear the door latch either time. I make the decision, take a breath, and push the lever. It moves so smoothly and silently that for a second, I don’t realize that the door has opened.