"Gavin?"
He looked up with a start. Sasha was sliding into the booth across from him. It took him a moment to recognize her. He hadn't seen her since she was eighteen years old. "I thought that was you," she said. "I just came back from my break and saw you here." She'd brought two cups of coffee. " Cream or sugar?"
"Both. Thank you."
"You're welcome." She carried a faint aura of cigarette smoke. The preceding decade had been hard on her. She carried the kind of exhaustion that he'd seen only rarely in a woman so young, and mostly only in his time as a reporter. She had the look of women who've worried too much, smoked too many cigarettes, been too poor for too many years, and worked too hard for long hours. She was studying him. "Gavin," she said, "you don't look so good."
"I've had better weeks."
"Are you trying to grow a beard?"
"Not on purpose."
"Well, what brings you here?"
"You know," he said. "Anna."
"Don't tell me you're involved in this."
He nodded carefully. She sighed.
"I don't like it," she said. "Anything about it."
Gavin wasn't sure what to say, so he just watched her. A trick taught to him by an older reporter at the paper: Sometimes if you're silent they'll just keep talking.
"I just can't stand the way they're using the girl," she said.
"Perhaps it's the only way to do it," Gavin ventured, when it became clear that she was waiting for a response. The girl? Could she possibly mean his daughter?
"It's a terrible plan," she said, "and has been from the beginning. If it were up to me it wouldn't be this way. What happened to your arm?"
"Just a stupid accident," Gavin said.
"God, I'm sorry, I'm usually not this rude." Sasha glanced out at the parking lot. She seemed ill at ease. "I haven't seen you in ten years, and all I can talk about is the goddamned plan. This week aside, Gavin, how's your decade been?"
"Good and then bad. How was your decade?"
"Difficult," she said, "but there were a few good moments. Didn't you go to New York and become a reporter or something?"
"I did," Gavin said. "I became a reporter, and then I got fired, and now I'm working for my sister."
"Here in Sebastian?"
"Here in Sebastian."
"Why were you fired?"
"Fraud," he said.
She sipped her coffee, her eyes on his face. "I heard you were engaged."
"I was," Gavin said. "I'm not anymore." He hadn't thought of Karen in a while, but her presence once summoned hadn't dulled with time. Karen's smile, Karen moving through a room, Karen brushing a strand of hair from her forehead as she read the Sunday Times over coffee in their sunlit kitchen in Manhattan. He wondered where she was tonight.
"I'm sorry," Sasha said. "It sounds like you've lost some things."
Gavin didn't know what to say, so he nodded and said nothing. They sat together for a moment in silence. "I heard you went to Florida State," he said finally.
"I did. I was studying English lit." She seemed disinclined to explain how she'd gone from studying literature to working the graveyard shift in a roadside diner, and Gavin didn't know how to ask without being rude. "If you know the plan, you've spoken with Daniel since you've been back," she said. "Tell me something, has he seemed strange to you lately?"
"Strange in what way?"
"Like something's horribly wrong," she said. "I don't mean to be melodramatic."
"I don't know," Gavin said. "He seems to have changed considerably since high school."
"Do you know if the time's been set?"
It took Gavin a moment to understand that she was talking about the plan again, and he wished more than anything at that moment that he could shed the pretense and just ask her what she was talking about.
"I haven't heard anything about that."
"Well, Daniel or Liam will let us know, I suppose. All I know is it's going to be sometime between one and three in the morning." She was looking out at the parking lot again, her eyes moving over the few parked cars. It wasn't just that she was ill at ease, he realized. She was frightened.
"Right," he said.
"Well," she said, "I should get back to work. Are you sticking with coffee?"
"I'm not that hungry. Sasha, could you tell me about my daughter?"
"How long have you known about Chloe?"
"Not long," he said. "Why didn't Anna ever tell me?"
"I don't know. I think she was embarrassed about running off with someone else."
"Is there anything you could tell me about her?"
Sasha smiled. " About Chloe? You'd like her," she said. "She's a good kid. Polite, good grades at school. She wants to be an acrobat when she grows up. She likes to draw."
"What does she draw? If you don't mind me asking."
"Houses," Sasha said. "Flowers, people, trees, the usual kid things. Suns with smiley faces. Bicycles."
"And she's— is she okay?"
"She's fine. Well, I don't know, actually, she's staying in a motel with Anna. I assume she's fine. I haven't seen her in a while."
" Thank you," Gavin said. There was a tightness in his throat. " Could I possibly talk to Anna?"
"Not till this is over," she said. "You've no idea how nervous she is."
"Will you tell her that I asked about her?"
Sasha was standing now, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the front of her apron. "I will. I'll tell her."
"Wait," he said. "Can I borrow your pen?" She gave it to him and he wrote his address and cell number on a corner of the place mat, tore it off and gave it to her. "If you wouldn't mind," he said. "In case she wants to know where to find me."
"I'll give it to her," Sasha said. He watched her move away across the room.
Part Three
Twenty-One
Sasha was raised on stories of brave children entering magical countries. Narnia was behind the coats in a wardrobe. Alice fell down the rabbit hole. There was another story whose name she couldn't remember about a brother and sister picking up a golden pinecone in the woods and in that motion, that lifting of an enchanted object from the forest floor, a new world rotated silently into place around them.
"Once you step into the underworld it's hard to come out again," she said to William Chandler. This was a few months before Gavin appeared in the Starlight Diner with his arm in a sling. Sasha and William met in the diner a few times a month to drink coffee together before the start of her shift. William wasn't her official sponsor at Gamblers Anonymous, her official sponsor had left town a long time ago and Sasha wasn't sure what had become of her, but they had gravitated toward one another over years of meetings and he often seemed more like a sponsor than a friend.