She moves with confidence.
Her confidence makes her even more beautiful to me. It makes me feel sad, too, because she really isn’t with me. She really isn’t on my side. She’s my natural enemy. A reporter.
For a second, though, I allow myself to imagine her coming home with me as a true partner, wanting to be there.
The engine starts.
I tie the canoe onto the top. Ann sits behind the wheel, taking apart her phone.
“What are you doing?”
“Just in case,” she says mysteriously. Soon we’re on the road.
“You can start a car without the key,” I say. “How do you know to do that?”
She hesitates, and my heart darkens because I know she’ll lie, or at least tell me a half-truth.
It’s good to remember she’s lying and that she doesn’t want to be with me, that she only wants me for the story.
“I learned while spending time overseas,” she says finally.
I nod.
“Working in conflict zones,” she adds. “Some of these areas, half the cars don’t have keys to them anymore.”
“You were a nurse in conflict zones?” I ask, smoothing my finger over the side of the plastic wolf that looks so much like my old friend. A true ally. I’ll see them soon. It’s beyond imagining.
I’m sure they’ll love Ann. I hope she’ll come to love them.
“You worked as a nurse in war zones,” I say, wanting her to lie more, to remind me what she really is. The professor read me a famous book about a war hospital once. The man was injured in a hospital, and a nurse loved him. The nurse in the book really did love the man, though.
“I took on nursing roles,” she says.
It comes to me that this is what she does everywhere—she pretends to be a nurse when she’s not.
Pretending to care. It shouldn’t feel like a blade in my belly—she does it with everyone.
Still, I keep going back to that moment when she reached up to me. It felt so real and good.
I tell myself it doesn’t matter. She’ll submit to me just as prey submits to the superior force of the predator.
“Have you thought any more about the Kiro thing?” she asks. “Have any more memories come?”
I study her lips. I love watching her lips. “No.”
“What were the people who raised you like? Were they Albanian by any chance? The people after us had the tattoos of the Albanian mob.” She pauses. “You know Albania? It’s a tiny country…”
My face flushes with shame. “I don’t know that country.”
“A lot of people don’t know Albania. It’s an Eastern European country near Greece. Crime organizations out of that part of the world can be very deadly. Very vicious. Could the people who raised you have any ties at all…”
“The people who raised me were interested in church and riverboats and fixing their adopted children. My father owned a hardware store. My mother was a teacher.”
“Hmm. Even so, could they have…I don’t know, taken a loan from the wrong people? Though that’s really a stretch. Plus the men who attacked you called you Kiro,” she says. “Do you remember anything from before your adoptive family?”
“You certainly are eager for my story.”
“These people are hunting you for a reason, and it’s a big one,” she says.