Chapter 3 The Other Side

Levi

We drove in silence until the city thinned into dark fields. Only then did Rocco speak.

"Sit up."

I did. He passed something back over the seat without turning his head: a navy booklet and a plastic card.

I opened the passport under the glow of the dashboard. A woman I had never met looked back at me from the photograph, which I recognized as one taken at sixteen, from my father's file. Lena Hart. Twenty-five years old. A birthplace in a country I had never visited.

"The other side of the river," Rocco said. "Matteo's name is a bad word there. Because of the old war. His men can't walk in openly, and they can't pay anyone to look for you." His voice tightened. "There's a town called Blackwater, eleven miles in. Small. Quiet. Far enough from the bridge to matter."

"Rocco."

"Harrow Cross has eyes. Matteo owns the station, half the hotels, and a customs officer on the bridge named Tomas who owes him money. He's lazy before coffee. Cross at dawn, with the workers. Keep your hood down. Say as little as you can."

"And you?"

"I turn around, and I go home, and I'm furious with the whole world for a week." He almost smiled. "Matteo likes his men furious. It reads as loyalty."

"If he finds out..."

"He won't." He said it too fast. We both heard it.

The road climbed. Somewhere past midnight, a pair of headlights appeared behind us and stayed there for twelve long miles, and neither of us said a word. At the next junction, Rocco turned left without signaling, and the lights went straight on, and he let out a breath that shook.

The station at Harrow Cross was a gray hall with a stopped clock and a bank of coin lockers along one wall. A single man slept on a bench with a newspaper over his face. I looked at him for a long time through the glass before I let myself go in.

Rocco did not turn the engine off. He pushed his whole wallet into my hands, and when I tried to give it back, he closed my fingers around it.

"Don't write. Don't call. Just live." His eyes were wet, and he did not seem to know it. "That's all I want."

I leaned across the seat and kissed his cheek. It was the only payment I had. I hated how well it worked.

"Go."

I watched the taillights until they were gone.

Inside, the hall smelled of cold metal and floor wax. I crossed it slowly, with my hood up, on the balls of my feet. The man on the bench did not stir. I chose a locker at the bottom behind a pillar, knelt, and slid the ledger in.

"Train's not till six."

I froze, with my hand on the metal door.

The newspaper had slipped from the man's face. He was looking at me from the bench, one eye open, a thick man in a work jacket with a wedding ring and a stale smell of sleep.

"I know," I said. "I'll wait."

"Cold out."

"Yes."

He watched me a moment longer. I made myself close the locker door slowly, as though I had done nothing but stow a bag. I made myself sit down on the far bench with my back to the lockers and my hands in my lap.

After a minute, he pulled the newspaper back over his face and began to snore.

I did not breathe properly for twenty minutes. When I was certain, I got up, turned the key, and slid it into my boot under the insole, where it dug into my heel like a small, stubborn truth.

A book like that was a leash on a man like Matteo. If I carried it across a border, a stranger might find it in my bag. If I left it here, it belonged to nobody but me.

---

At dawn, the bridge was a gray stripe over a gray river, with a line of workers shuffling toward the customs post on the near side. I joined the end of it with my hood down and my passport in my fist.

I had crossed this bridge once before. Fourteen months ago, in a hooded coat, three steps behind Matteo, while he met a man on the far bank. He had told me to keep my head down. I had kept my eyes on the water for the entire hour, because Matteo liked it when I did not look at other men.

The line moved. The booth window slid open.

Tomas was fifty, rumpled, with the swollen eyes of a man who has not had his coffee. He looked at my passport. He looked at me. He looked at the photograph for a very long time.

"Hart," he said.

"Yes."

"Purpose of travel?"

"Visiting family. In Blackwater."

"Blackwater." He turned a page. "Long way from anywhere."

My heart beat against the key in my boot. Somewhere behind me, a worker coughed. Tomas picked up his phone, looked at it, and set it down again. He stamped the page, hard, with a hand that did not tremble.

"Mind the mist," he said, and waved me on.

I walked out onto the bridge.

Halfway across, I stopped and looked back. The South lay behind me, flat and gray and silent. Nobody was following. Nobody in the world knew where I was.

On the far bank, a painted sign leaned in the weeds. BLACKWATER, 11 MILES.

I had never been so frightened. I had never been so free.

I walked on.

---

On the fourth day, I cut my hair.

The motel in Blackwater had a bathroom the color of old teeth and a mirror with a crack across one corner. I sat on the edge of the tub with a pair of scissors from the front desk and looked at the woman in the glass. Long dark hair, down to her waist. Matteo had liked it that way. He used to wind it around his fist while he told me what a good girl I was.

I took the first handful and cut.

It fell in the sink like something shot. I kept going. The scissors were dull and the cuts came out crooked, and by the time I stopped, I had a ragged line at my jaw and a floor covered in black. My neck felt bare. My head felt light enough to float off.

I looked at the stranger in the mirror for a long time.

She looked like someone nobody owned.

Lena Hart, I told her silently. Twenty-five. From nowhere.

I swept the hair into a bag and dropped it in a bin three streets away.