I freeze once more, straining to hear, to pinpoint the source of the noise.

And then I see the flashlight bouncing crazily off the walls that are a mixture of soft-yellow stone and concrete block. The rails gleam where the light hits them some fifteen yards from where I am standing.

Whoever is holding the light hasn’t appeared yet, and I am caught between hope and despair.

I open my mouth to shout.

Help! I was trapped but I got out. Show me the way up!

But I don’t say anything. Instead, instinctively, I take several long, silent strides back along the track, still facing the person with the light. My feet are almost soundless, and I plant them carefully, exaggerating the downward movement so I don’t inadvertently kick something that will make a noise. The buffer hits me in the small of my back. I grasp it with my right hand and hold on as I go round it and drop to my knees. The buffer is braced with diagonal struts, and I almost lose my balance as I get between them and press myself small and close to the gravelly stone floor, breathing fast.

The footsteps have not altered. The flashlight still feels unguided, almost casual. But then, abruptly, everything stops.

He has reached my cell. That was where he was going, and now he can see that the door is open.

Should I have closed it?

It doesn’t matter.

He is perhaps twenty yards away. No more. I hear his uncertainty, his confusion in the uncanny stillness. Then there is movement again, urgent now, panicked, and the light stabs this way and that, so I bury my head in my hands and try to make myself invisible behind the buffer. I hide my hands and face and hope he won’t make sense of what he can still see.

Keep still.

I do, and in my peripheral vision I sense the flashlight raking the tunnel. The passage is narrower than I had imagined and low ceilinged, no larger than the inside of a train car. Behind the buffer it stops, the blocks ending in a wall that looks like solid natural rock. For the merest fraction of a second, the light hits my skin and the hem of my dress. It’s yellow, and I remember it immediately, though it is filthy now. The light moves on, and I can almost smell his furious alarm, his disbelief.

But then he calms, and the flashlight begins to move more carefully. There is almost complete silence again, and I realize slowly that he has seen something, something worthy of close inspection.

When I am sure the light is not turned toward me, I risk a look over the buffer. He has the flashlight aimed at the ground and seems to have dropped to his haunches. I can see the cell door open. It is one of three, though the others are closed. The light fixes on the floor and by the overspill I see, silhouetted and unfocused though it is, the size of him, the bulk of his body and head. All the old terror floods back at the strangeness of the sight as my hindbrain shrieks

Minotaur!

But then he moves, and I realize with another shock that his body above the waist seems so large because he’s wearing something, something that goes with the mask on his face.

An air tank.

He’s not just wearing the scuba mask to hide his face. He’s wearing the complete breathing apparatus.

From my hidden vantage I stare, and that’s when I realize what he’s doing. He’s seen something on the cell floor. I feel the slickness clotting around the thumb of my left hand, and I know what he’s seen.

Blood.

Not a lot, but enough. I’ve left a trail.

Chapter Twenty-Eight It was just Simon and me. I had hoped Marcus would come. Or Kristen. But for all Melissa’s words of understanding and forgiveness, they were all still wary of me and I couldn’t blame them. However much they might pity me, who would want to be friends with someone who might break into your room and cut up your underwear? They might tolerate me. They might even accept me, look after me, but you can’t love someone this fucked up.

If Marcus had come, I told myself, I would have found some way to tell him my confession had been false, but that may have done more harm than good. It was probably just as well that we were apart.

So I rode with Simon, back through the mountain villages to the coast road past Rethymno to Heraklion, and it was only in that last stretch that we encountered any real traffic. In the hills there had been rockslides, and trees had come down in the storm. It wouldn’t take much, I thought, to cut us off if the weather worsened.

Simon said little for the first hour. He seemed tense, focused on driving, and when I reached for the radio he said, “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

I snatched my hand back as if burned, but I smiled and said, “Sure, no problem,” because that was what I did, those little lies that grease the wheels and make life bearable.

“Why did you come, Jan?” he asked without preamble.

“What?” I said, still smiling. “I told you. I want to speak to Gretchen . . .”

“No, not now. I mean Crete. The whole trip.”

“What do you mean? You invited me and I thought—”

“Yes, but why did you come? I mean, we cover your costs and all, so it’s a free vacation and you don’t have a lot of spare cash, but . . .”

“Well,” I began, about to counter that last remark and probably spin some stupid falsehood in the process. I didn’t get the chance.

“No, but seriously,” he said. “It’s just us. Just you and me. So what’s it all about? Why are you here?”

I blink, genuinely confused.

“You think this is about me wanting to get back with Marcus,” I say.

“No,” he says. “Maybe. Is it?”

“No.”

“OK, so what is it?”

“I just wanted to see you all, relive our last trip . . .”

“And how are we doing?” he said. His eyes were on the road, riveted to it, but his voice was clipped, the words bitten off like meat.

“I don’t think I understand . . .”

“Which bit of our last visit did you most want to relive, Jan?”

“Just seeing everyone and—”

“OK,” he said, cutting me off.

“I’m not sure I get what you’re . . .”

“I said, ‘OK,’” he said. “Leave it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, confused and uneasy. “Is it something I said?”

He laughed at that, a short, snapping sound without amusement.

I think to ask him about Manos, but I don’t. His mood is too strange and Gretchen’s odd warning is ringing in my head. We barely speak again till we reach the airport, and when I say I’m going to find a bathroom, he just nods.

The bathroom isn’t as easy to find as I thought it would be, and I have to walk a ways. While I’m sitting there in the stall, I fish out my phone and take the opportunity of a signal to scroll through my e-mail. There are a few notifications from work, the announcement of who got the executive lead position—a woman I’d never heard of—and a few other minor bits and pieces. Nothing of significance, and I’m struck by how little time I have actually been away. It feels like weeks, but it’s only been four days, and the rest of the world has proceeded at its tedious and familiar pace.

I open Google and type in Manos. The list of results is unhelpful: a low-budget horror film, a scattering of sites in Greek, some games, some charitable organizations. Nothing obviously significant. I add the term Rethymno to the search and then, on impulse, the date of our visit to the cave five years ago. Now, most of the results are in Greek, and I have to run each one through Google Translate. Most are newspaper stories. Manos, it seems, is a name. A man’s.

Or a boy’s.

The picture loads slowly, but I know him immediately. I have his face filed away on my laptop back home.

Waiter boy.

The kid who worked at the Taverna Diogenes. The one who had mooned around Melissa in between waiting on us and leading tourists on snorkeling trips around the bay.

Manos.

I remembered now. But we hadn’t seen him that last day. I was almost sure of it. We had gone to the restaurant for our last meal, expecting the sponges he had promised, but he hadn’t been there. It was one of the various little disappointments and frustrations of our last hours, and Melissa had sulked through the meal, then complained of a headache and gone to bed.

I read the page quickly. The translation was wooden, clunky, but its core required no subtlety. On the last day of our trip, Manos Veranikis, son of Maria, proprietor of the Taverna Diogenes, had been killed in a freak diving accident.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I hadn’t realized my hand had bled enough to leave a trail, and I can’t see to know if that trail will lead to my hiding place. I watch unblinkingly as he sweeps the flashlight beam across the ground from the open cell over the threshold to the tunnel, conscious of the way my right hand is quietly exploring the ground for a rock or hunk of discarded machinery that I might use as a weapon if the worst happens.