Raoul carried Irene aboard the airplane they had flown from Valencia. Mallory watched them go, watched Morrow jump down from the broken Potez and into the sunlight. He dusted off his hands and stuck his head back inside.

“I imagine you already know this, Mallory,” he said, in a kind voice, “but there will be no airplane sent back to rescue you. You’re on your own. And if you do survive, by some miracle, you stay the hell away from my wife from now on. Is that clear?”

Mallory spoke through cracked lips. “Go to hell, Morrow.”

Morrow shook his head and turned away. As he walked across the sand, he called back, over his shoulder, “Just remember, this was your doing, Mallory.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

November 1947

In the summer of 1946, I was in Nuremberg, that half-ruined city of ghosts and lawyers. My hotel was lousy; the food was worse. The daily evidence of man’s perfidy accumulated in what I had begun to imagine as sedimentary layers, grotesque upon grotesque, and I meanwhile suffered from some stubborn, unspecific gastric illness that was melting the flesh from my bones.

Miserable and starved, I sat at the bar of my hotel one evening in July, enduring the heat through a succession of whiskey sours and American cigarettes, when a fellow showed up and asked if I could possibly direct him to Miss Eugenia Everett, the photographer. He wore the uniform of an RAF squadron commander, the same uniform Velázquez had worn, so I told him I was Miss Everett, who wanted to know?

He removed his cap and sat on the stool next to me and placed a worn, yellowing envelope on the counter between us, seam side up so I couldn’t see the name written on the back. He introduced himself as Captain Alfred Hawley and said that he had flown with a certain Captain Raoul Velázquez de los Monteros of the No. 56 Squadron in January 1945, out of the Volkel airfield in The Netherlands; did I perhaps recall Captain Velázquez?

I said I recalled him very well.

Captain Hawley said he was sorry to have taken so long to find me, but his duties with the RAF had not allowed him to pursue any personal errands until recently. He said that he had known Velázquez well during their time together at Volkel, and that about a week before his final flight, Velázquez took him aside and said he’d had a premonition of his own death, and if he should die and Hawley survive, he asked that Hawley deliver a letter to a photographer for the Associated Press named Eugenia Everett. Hawley had said of course, though he assured Velázquez that they would both survive to toast Hitler’s defeat. In any case, there was the letter. Hawley was glad to have found me and discharged his obligation to a brother officer, which had weighed heavily on him during the long, hard months since the loss of Velázquez, a tremendous flier and a damned fine chap.

I thanked Hawley and asked if I could buy him a drink, and after some hesitation he agreed. Lest you think I had any immoral intentions, let me assure you I weighed about ninety-seven pounds at the time, was sick as a dog and wan as a phantom, and fully expected to vomit up those whiskey sours as soon as I returned to the dank, shabby, gloomy garret upstairs that disgraced the name of hotel rooms everywhere. All I craved was some crumb of information about Velázquez and his last days. Hawley spoke for an hour; I won’t bore you with everything he said. Just that Velázquez had turned especially devout in his final weeks, had gone to confession almost daily, which made me glad because I did not want Velázquez to suffer long in purgatory because of me.

Anyway, you’re not interested in all that, are you? You want to know what the letter said. Here it is. You might as well read the whole damned thing.

My dear Janey,

For some time I have reproached myself for withholding from you certain facts regarding the fate of your father. I told you I had made a promise to him. This was true, but I have come to believe that he would not hold me to this vow if he knew that his precious daughter would one day come in search of him.

Yet you generously allowed me to keep my secrets, and when I reflect on the greatness of your spirit, I am once more overcome by this love I confessed to you only once, but which I felt with all my soul from the very earliest moment of our friendship. You will say in your brisk American voice that I am a sentimental idiot, but it is my honor and privilege to be a sentimental idiot on this subject, and to be grateful to God that He has granted me this final joy when I had thought all joy impossible. It is the last remaining desire of my heart to reunite with you after the war is finished, so that I may explain all this from my own lips, but if God wills that we shall not meet again on earth, I pray this letter will find you instead.

You will find the wreckage of Samuel Mallory’s airplane in the shelter of a grand massif in the Bardenas Reales, in the province of Navarre, in the northeast part of Spain. Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, and the diary that belonged to Mr. Mallory, which will shed some light, I suspect, on the events that led to this catastrophe. To all this I can only recommend that you use your immense cleverness to gather all these hints into a map that will guide you to what you seek, because I cannot commit to paper any further confidence, or even reveal to you how this knowledge came to me.

May you discover happiness, my beloved, and may a merciful God forever bless you.

Velázquez

I think about this letter, and the particular phrase Inside this wreckage you will find a human body, which you should treat with the reverence due to all God’s creatures, as I pedal my bicycle furiously through the wind and rain down the highway into town. It’s funny how you can assume all along that a sentence means one thing, because of your own particular assumptions, when really it can mean something entirely different if you examine it from a fresh perspective.

When I reach the pier, the ferry is still tied securely to its mooring, and the sign on the gate reads closed for weather. But nearby, a fellow’s bustling about a smaller, nimbler boat, preparing it to launch. I call out and the man turns, and right away I see from Leo’s face that he’s heard about the reporters gathered at the airfield, and not only has he heard the news but he’s holding me responsible.

“Where do you think you’re going?” I yell.

Leo turns away and ducks into the deckhouse. I climb off the bicycle and jump over the railing.

“Don’t you dare ignore me! I need to find her right now!”

“You don’t have the right!”

“I have every right! You lied to me! About your father and Irene!”

He flinches at that. “Because I had to! Irene told me to. And it turns out we were right. Now beat it.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Ki’ilau!”

“In this weather?”

“Yes, in this weather!” He reaches for the rope that secures the boat to the piling. “Irene took off from the airfield almost an hour ago.”

“And how the hell do you know she went to Ki’ilau?”

He doesn’t answer that, just unwinds the rope and prepares to cast off, and a terrible feeling takes hold of me, fear and also anger. A clatter of metal sounds behind me, and Sophie Rofrano’s urgent voice. She leaps off a bicycle and runs up the dock to the railing.

“Leo! What’s happened?”

“Sophie! Jesus. Thank God.”

“What’s wrong? Where’s Irene?”

“She’s flown to Ki’ilau,” Leo says. “And she’s taken the kids with her.”

The kids.

To be clear, I don’t give a damn about Irene Lindquist at the present moment, clinging to the railing of Leo’s boat as we tear across the water. I don’t care whether she cracks up in this tempest or does not, whether she lives or does not. My anger toward Irene has returned at full force, so thick and bubbling it may blow at any second.

But the kids.