Page 65 of 13 Nights

I have him now. He's standing in my kitchen, examining my coffee maker with the disgusted fascination of a man born two centuries before the invention of drip brewing.

I begin to type. Not because I can finish the book before dark, but because Lena can. Because the record needs a living witness, and I have one day to leave her the beginning.

At noon, exactly when Lena claimed she would begin looking for me, her car tears into the gravel lane. She clearly never intended to wait. She gets out before the engine stops, holding her phone like a weapon. When the front door opens and I'm standing behind it, alive and whole and in desperate need of a shower, her face goes through four expressions in two seconds. The last one is fury.

"Three days," she says. "I said three days. And you didn't call."

"I know."

"I left Brooklyn at six in the morning. I screamed at Tom Hadley over speakerphone all the way up the Saw Mill."

"I'm sorry."

"You are going to explain everything, and then I am going to yell at you until I lose my voice, and then we are going to drink whatever is in this kitchen, and then you are going to introduce me to whoever is in the next room because I can hear him breathing and this cottage is not that big."

Severin appears in the kitchen doorway. He looks at Lena. Lena looks at him. The assessment is immediate, mutual, and thorough.

"You must be Lena," he says. "I've heard a great deal about you."

"I haven't heard nearly enough about you." She turns to me. "Start talking."

I do.

I seal the Marburg packet and leave it on the desk with instructions for Lena to mail it Monday morning. The formal review will take months. The truth may take longer. If they reject the evidence, I'll send it again. If they ignore me, I'll publish it.

One way or another, the man who died at White Plains will have his own name restored to the record.

By late afternoon, Lena has extracted every available detail and moved from fury to something quieter and harder to name. She sits on the porch steps with a glass of wine she found under the sink, and I sit beside her.

"We have until dark," I tell her.

She doesn't argue. She's too smart for arguments she can't win and too loyal to waste the time.

"Come back," she says.

"The Veil opened every October for 250 years. It'll open again. And if there are other thresholds, other times it thins, we'll find them."

"You don't know that."

"No. But I'll look."

"You'd better." She takes a drink. "Because I am not finishing your book without editorial input."

"The notes are on the laptop. Everything I know is in the first chapter."

"That is not the same as you being here to yell at when the prose gets bad."

"Severin will yell at you about the prose. He has opinions."

"I noticed." She looks at me. Her eyes are wet and her jaw is set and she is the fiercest person I have ever known. "I'm going to be furious every time you leave."

"I know."

"And I'm going to be here every time you come back."

I pull her into me. She holds on with the ferocity of a woman who has already lost one person she loves and is choosing to let the second one go.

When the last light drains from the sky, the thread tightens. Severin feels it from the kitchen doorway. His hand goes still on the ceramic of the mug he's been holding.