It's a clean exit. It's the best thing I can do for her, and I have made this exact exit after every job my entire career.
I run the plan start to finish, standing on the last rise with the east cove below us, white stones, blue water and no boat yet, and it holds together perfectly, even if I don't believe a word of it.
That's the truth I stand there holding while Iris shades her eyes at the empty sea. The ghost's logic is intact. It's just no longer load-bearing. Ghosts don't stay. I’m reciting it to myself the way a man recites a prayer in a bid to make it happen, because the alternative is admitting that I don't know how to walk away from her. That there is no version of the kitchen door that ends with me turning around and leaving her.
"There," she says.
The boat comes around the eastern point right on its window, low and gray and running quiet, none of the subcontractor's idle drift. My man. Fourteen years of contracts and not one wasted word between us, which made him, until this week, the closest thing I had to a friend, a fact I intend never to tell him.
We come down the last slope to the beach and the morning does its final trick. The sun clears the shoulder of the island and lands on her all at once, and she turns in it, at the edge of the water with the sea behind her. The last nine days behind her, and looks back up the hill at the island where we both underwent such huge transformations, that I wouldn’t believe it had I not experienced it.
"Well," she says. "I'd leave a review, but I don't know what I'd rate it."
"The accommodation was defensible."
"The host was very attentive." Her mouth curves. Then the curve softens into something that goes through me like an arrow, and she holds out her hand, palm up, an offer, a door. "Take me home, Yakob."
Home.
Hers, she means.
I take her hand. The boat's hull grinds soft on the stones, and my man raises two fingers off the tiller in the entirety of his greeting. I help her aboard, this woman I was paid to retrieve and would now burn the world down to keep, and I take my seat where I can watch the water and her face at the same time, the divided attention I've stopped fighting.
The island shrinks behind us. The farmhouse is already invisible, folded back into the terraces, keeping what it holds.
Deliver her and disappear. It's for the best. It's always been for the best. It’s always been the job.
I look at her hand in mine, at the sunlight on the water ahead of us, and I hold the old prayer in my mouth all the way across the strait.
I don't say amen.
Iris
The last fifteen minutes of the drive are the same fifteen minutes I've driven a thousand times, only now it all seems so different.
I recognize everything. The bend where the hedgerow leans out too far, the field with the leaning gate, the stretch where the trees close over the road and the light goes green. The gates…
It's me that's different. I left this road eleven days ago with the radio up and my brain switched off, thinking about nothing, because nothing was my favorite thing to think about. The woman coming back sits with her back to the door pillar so she can see both windows at once.
Yakob drives the way he does everything. Precisely, quietly, ten percent under the speed limit, which on this road is a personal insult to my entire bloodline.
"You drive like a retired accountant," I tell him.
"I drive like a man delivering something irreplaceable."
I look out the window so he won't see what that does to my face. It doesn't work. Nothing about me has ever been invisible to him, which is the whole problem, and the whole miracle.
He's been getting quieter since the boat. Not his usual quiet, which is a companionable thing, a room you're allowed to sit in. This is the other kind. The kind he had at the beginning, on the vineyard, in the fever, before I knew him. He's packing himself away, item by item. I can feel it happening beside me like a tidegoing out, and I don't know how to stop it. Every time I open my mouth to try, we get a kilometer closer to home and the words fizzle out because my brain is overwhelmed trying to figure out what to say to my family.
He called ahead from the airfield, four words, a time. The gates swing open onto the long drive and the house comes up out of the trees the way it always does, stone and glass and too many chimneys, my whole childhood arranged around a gravel courtyard.
Every light in the house is on. It's barely past four in the afternoon.
"They'll be in the kitchen," I say. My voice comes out strange.
"I know," he says. "Everything in that house seems to happen in the kitchen. Your brothers briefed me in the study and I could still hear that the kitchen was the central hub of the house."
We come around the last curve and I see the kitchen door standing wide open, propped with Ma’s ancient doorstop. And spilling out of it, down the steps, into the courtyard, is my family.
