Emma flew up on the Friday with her sister's voice in a file on her laptop and no plan beyond the school gate.
She got there an hour early, because arriving early was the only part of the plan she controlled. Through the tall windows along the school's side wall she could see a classroom lit against the afternoon, and in it Priya β unmistakable, even at that distance, in the economical way she moved between the desks β teaching something with her whole body, chalk dust on her sleeve, a roomful of teenagers watching her the way teenagers only watch people they have decided not to eat alive. She looked competent. She looked ordinary. She looked like a woman who had built a life on top of the one night she could not put down, and Emma stood on the Toronto pavement with her hands in her coat pockets and hated herself for the relief of it: Priya had survived the secret. It could be survived. That was not the same as it being survivable.
She waited across the street from the school like a person in a film she would have mocked, watching the doors give up their hundreds of children into the cold bright afternoon, and then Priya came out with a tote bag and a travel mug and a lanyard, and stopped on the steps in the act of putting on her gloves, and looked straight at her.
Ten years. A whole other country. Priya did not look startled. That was the thing Emma would remember. She looked like a woman who had been glancing up at school gates for a decade, half her mind always on the pavement opposite, and had finally been proven right.
She crossed the street without hurrying. She did not ask how Emma had found her. She did not ask why now, or how Robert was, or say any of the hundred things a person says to a ghost at a school gate. She stood in front of Emma with her gloves in her hand and she said, at ordinary volume, like a password:
"Did you see the footage?"
Emma's mouth went dry. "Some of it."
"How much?" Priya's eyes did not leave her face. "Emma. How much is some?"
"Eleven minutes of it are gone. Somebody cut them, that night, with the house admin code. I've recovered a fragment β a few seconds of audio, one still. That's all. That's everything I have."
Priya closed her eyes. Not relief. Emma watched her understand that it could still β even now, even like this β be put back, and that the woman standing in front of her was perhaps the only person alive who was ever going to give her the chance to put it back, and that she had been waiting ten years for the choice and dreading it for exactly as long.
"Not here," Priya said, and turned, and Emma followed her three blocks to a cafΓ© with steamed windows, where Priya ordered tea she never touched and sat with her hands flat on the table as if she were keeping it from rising.
"I want you to understand something before anything else," Priya said. "I have been a coward for ten years in a very specific way. I can tell you exactly what my cowardice consisted of. But first I need to know what your fragment says. I need to know whether I'm breaking it for everything, or only for part."
"Breaking what, Priya?"
"The promise." Her voice did not waver. That was the teacher in her, Emma thought, ten years of classrooms. "Ask me what the fragment says and I'll know how much of my life I have to give you. Go on. Ask me."
Priya turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer β a small, precise movement Emma had seen another pair of hands make, days ago, in an office above a harbour, and the recognition went through her like a draught. "Your mother," Priya said. "Does she know you've come?" "My mother died three years ago." Priya went very still. "I wrote to her once," she said at last. "The year after. Four pages. I told her everything and nothing β she'd have known how to read it, your mother. I never sent it. It's in a box in my apartment with the rest of the country I used to live in."
So Emma told her. She described the still first β the dock, the two figures, the distance that was not the distance of lovers β and Priya listened without moving, and when Emma came to the audio she made herself say it in Sarah's own words, as flat as she could make them, which was not flat at all.
"You knew. You both knew."
The cafΓ© went on around them: cups, steam, somebody's child. Priya sat with her hands flat on the table and tears stood in her eyes without falling, and she nodded once, slowly, the way you nod at a diagnosis you have been expecting for years.
"Then it's everything," she said. "That's the dock. That's the real night. If you have that, you have the door, and I may as well open it." She looked down at her tea. "I rehearsed this. You should know that. I have sat in rooms in this city β good rooms, my own rooms β and rehearsed what I would say to a Lindqvist if one of you ever came. I had a version for your mother. I had a version for your father that would have taken the paint off the walls." Her mouth moved, not a smile. "I never had a version for you asleep upstairs. You were seventeen. You were the only innocent person at that party, and you're the one who flew to Toronto."
"Priya," Emma said. "What happened after 9:41?"
Priya picked up her gloves from the table and folded them, once, with great care, like a woman laying out the last orderly thing she owned.
"Come home with me," she said. "I'm not doing this where children buy muffins. Come home, and sit down, and ask me what you came to ask."
Chapter 10: What Priya Carried