Page 64 of Girl in the Water

“I’m not scared of a damn thing.”

“I’m scared a little,” she admitted.

He turned onto his side, facing her. His voice gentled as he said, “Of what?”

“Of never finding my place.” She turned on her side too, facing him. She couldn’t see his expression in the dark, and maybe that was for the best. “I am from the Amazon, but I don’t feel like I belong in the Amazon anymore. I don’t feel like I’m going home. I feel like a grown turtle, trying to wiggle back into the egg it came from. I don’t fit.”

He listened.

Her lips tugged into a half smile she knew he couldn’t see. “I’m very American now. I think I can chose my destiny and my place in the world. I want to control my fate.”

He still didn’t say anything.

“Back in the village, everything just was. I never even thought of myself as a prostitute. Never thought the word. I thought I was like my mother, and I loved my mother. She was a good woman. It was okay to be like her.”

“You were an exploited child,” Ian spoke at last. He didn’t use the other word. He’d never used that word in relation to her, ever.

“Sometimes,” she spoke her deepest fear into the dark, “I’m not sure if I deserved to be saved.”

“Nobody has to deserve to be saved.” His voice roughened. “And your place is with me.”

“But you want me to go off and make my own life.” And lately, every time he talked of her having that future life, separate from him, the words throbbed and hurt inside her chest.

“You’ll have your own life. You’ll have a husband and kids and a great job. But you’ll always have a place with me.”

“You think I deserve happiness.”

“I know you do.”

“Americans think everyone deserves to be happy. The people I knew before, they just hoped they’d survive from one day to the next.”

He fell back into silence.

“I think you deserve happiness too,” she said carefully. “I don’t think you should punish yourself for Linda and the twins anymore, Ian.”

And he did what she knew he’d do. He turned on his back and closed his eyes, ending the conversation.

* * *

Ian

The flight to Manaus, in the heart of the Amazon, ate up four hours, the plane booked full, people pressed together, so Ian and Daniela couldn’t discuss the case.

They couldn’t discuss the previous night either, because somehow, in the fricking two minutes that Ian actually slept, he managed to roll over to her side of the bed and had put his arms around her.

He didn’t know which one of them was more surprised when they woke. He’d never shot out of bed that fast in his life, not even in his army days.

Letting Karin Kovacs pair them up on this case had been the worst idea ever. This could never happen again.

Ian looked out the plane’s window at the meeting of the rivers. The Rio Negro converged with the Rio Solimões just below Manaus, the Rio Negro’s nearly black water meeting Rio Solimões’s light brown. The colors stayed separate where the rivers met, didn’t mix, as if some fancy barista had drawn a cream line on coffee.

All that water made Ian think of the Potomac.

The Potomac had taken away Linda and the boys.

The Rio Negro had given him Daniela.

One river had swallowed his heart; another river, halfway around the world, had gifted it back. A different heart, beaten up, scarred, but a beating heart at least.