Page 106 of Shatter

Never let myself wonder whether she walked out of the airport into a courtroom and went home and lived, or walked out into a parking garage where Naglfar was waiting.

If I don't look, she's alive.

Every night, in a kitchen in Oslo, she's alive.

"Let me look." Anni's voice is low and fierce in the dark.

I turn my head.

"I'm good at this." Her fingers tighten on mine. "Finding where things went. It's what I did for nine years. Money, shipments, shell companies, people who changed their names. If there's a record of her anywhere, a court filing or a death certificate, I can find it."

Heat climbs behind my eyes.

For one second, I let myself see it.

A name on a screen.

An address.

A face, twenty years older, with lines around the eyes.

Or a date on a headstone.

"No." It comes out hoarse. "Not yet."

She doesn't argue.

She holds my hand in the dark and waits, the way I waited for her.

"I'm not ready." My voice cracks down the middle. "If you find out she's dead, I lose her. Right now, I haven't lost her yet."

Anni doesn't say anything.

She lifts my hand to her mouth and presses her lips against my scabbed knuckles, one at a time, slow.

Then she lays my hand against her cheek and holds it there.

I look at her in the dark, her face in my palm.

Tear tracks cut through the flour dust, and two inches of blonde shine at her part.

She came to me in pieces, and she's still in pieces, with her brother in a hotel room downtown and a man in Vancouver who wants her back.

And she's sitting here in the dark worrying about mine.

"Jeg elsker deg." It comes up out of me before I can stop it.

The last time I heard those words, my mother was kneeling on an airport floor with her hands on my face.

Anni goes very still.

She doesn't know what they mean, but she knows.

I watch her know.

"I love you." I say it again in English, so there's no mistaking it. "Annika. I love you."

Her breath stops, and her eyes go wide and wet in the dark.