[fic]: you're always where you leave yourself (jason/marie)

[alice_1005]

Title: you're always where you leave yourself

Fandom: bourne; jason/marie

Summary: After New York, Jason tries to go home.

iii. the end

april 2004, Goa

Jason had handed over enough cash to buy the cottage outright, so the keys worked. It was quiet, out of the way, tucked into a strip of beach a little too overgrown to be popular for tourists, so it wasn’t disturbed, either. He knew right away that no one had been inside since he fled India eight weeks ago.

It was full of little things. More mugs than they could drink out of, handmade vases of dried flowers, trinkets she picked up here and there. Rows and rows of spices, only half that she ever touched—though she’d still gone to the trouble of getting the wooden racks up on the wall. Relished it, even, as though the effort alone was the reward. When he’d first found her again, two years ago off the Grecian coast, he knew that little shop was hers the moment he walked in the door. It was overflowing with signs of the only life he knew.

Their home was no different. At first, they stayed too fleetingly anywhere to leave much of a mark, but it got harder and harder to deny her the opportunity. Harder to remember what the point of it was, more tempting every day to believe her reassurances. That they’d been careful enough. That they could have this. They stayed in Goa for seven months.

Before it cost him everything, she hung glass and metal charms by the front door and tied flowing, patterned curtains around their bed. Their edges brushed against the folds of a blue and white quilt, one of several she brought back from the market. It was handmade, she’d told him, and when he’d cautioned her, not for the first time, not to be too showy or memorable a customer she rolled her eyes and shoved it at his chest. His hand stilled on the softness of the fabric and she smiled.

Jason wasn’t willing to cede ground on the need to blend in, even after he gave up on her procuring so many objects at all. He stopped warning her they couldn’t expect to keep any only a few weeks after they left Mykonos together, when she reminded him that the car he had made her abandon in Paris contained everything she’d ever owned.

Jason remembers her, because he's so used to trying to. He can remember everything.

-

The day Marie died, he had to forget.

Most of the visual evidence he had of her was stripped and set alight, consigned to exfil. Almost everything. The photo he kept burns against his skin even now. The sole weakness he’d allow, if only to know they hadn’t been intangible.

He destroyed everything else. He emptied the fake drawers in his desk, grabbed the passports stashed in the frame on the bathroom wall—but he’d forgotten the hidden cabinet; the one in the blanket chest at the foot of their bed. That Marie had carved herself. Crudely but carefully, slowly over weeks as though to prove something she didn’t have to. Maybe it was a little defiant, even—Marie didn’t fill it with the litany of fake passports or documentation Jason made, but with scribbled letters she’d never send. That she’d never so much as suggested sending. She didn’t hide when she wrote them. Sometimes at his desk, but more often than not curled on the sofa. Her face neutral, as though it were a normal thing to do, as though those she was writing to would ever receive anything.

The letters don’t matter anymore, Jason knows that. If they ever did, it was only as a threat: proof that not every danger to them was external. But if Marie had doubts about what she’d signed up for, they’d always been held firmly and unwaveringly at bay—as little as Jason had been able to believe it sometimes. Marie never even asked. He never had to tell her, you can’t.

Even in death, she should own something. There’s little Jason wants more than to read words he never got to hear her say, imagining them in her voice, trying to line them all up in his spiderwebbed portrait of her life with and before him. For years, it was so much fuller than any of his own memories. And as much as Marie hoped otherwise, she was the only good thing Jason ever remembered.

Jason knows many of the letters Marie wrote are very likely about him. About what her life was like, after she had left everything for him. He doesn’t read them. He took her freedom, her life—she can keep this.

Still, he thumbs at the clump of pages in his hands. Splayed against his fingers in many muted shades of stationary. He doesn’t have to discern their words to see the name Martin over and over. Thinking of those words Martin spoke to him in Paris, the insistent refrain Jason had denied—that it was always going to end this way. Always, the shadow of death looming over him, and how unfair it is that it would take Marie first when Jason's the one who brought it to her door.

Jason knows coming here is a risk. He has little faith that his stunt in the water in New York will buy him anything more than time. Someone will always be trying to find him, no matter where he goes. Of all his past locations, they may not have narrowed Goa down as precisely as where he stands now. But the people looking for him know he tried to make a life in this town. They know what it cost him.

Part of Jason hopes it’s so obvious a return as to be dismissed outright as a possibility. But he knows that’s not why he’s here.

He didn’t know where else to go. He didn’t know who else he could be, without a purpose. Without her.

Jason makes a decision as irrational and emotional as coming here in the first place. He leaves for the nearest hospital.

-

The first time Jason remembers bribing his way into a morgue, Marie had stood beside him. He never asked her how it felt to watch him look for a body, the slow realisation of just what she was getting herself into by following him. Where she could end up.

They’re all the same: same cold medical light, same emptiness, and this is an unnecessary risk. But the past eight weeks don’t feel like they’ve really happened to him. Jason could push past the shock of losing Marie only through the unerring determination of finishing a mission. With nothing left to expose, no one else to avenge, and any hope of lasting peace gone with her, he feels adrift—anchored only by what he might find here.

“How long do you keep them?”

Jason's question breaks the silence from where the morgue attendant is scrutinising his records in vain. Angling them on the table between them so that Jason can’t read anything, as if that preserves any of his integrity. Jason watches the way his finger runs down the handwritten columns and knows from the steady path it traces that he’s not suspected. Not yet.

“It depends. There are religious requirements, and family—”

“She would have been unknown. No family. Pulled out of the water.”

If she was ever found. If she’s not drifting still.

The attendant freezes, his sudden understanding almost audible, and Jason braces himself to flee.

Instead, what he hears next steals the breath from his lungs and fixes him where he stands.

“You should go upstairs.”

-

It doesn’t feel real. Jason knows the blackout edges of dreams, of nightmares, the nausea that choked, the burning throat and pounding headache. For hours, for years, he hunched forward while Marie touched him and he tried to assemble what was slipping like water from his mind — like a vast shore sprawling far beyond what he could see, like the infinite green where she had sunk away from him, forever out of his reach.

This isn’t that. He can’t hear anything, but what he’s seeing is sharp.

Up a short flight of disused stairs, the paint peeling to reveal the metal beneath. There’s a room just to the side as he surfaces, the unmarked door ajar. It’s small, and dark, and private, one of many in a long, featureless corridor.

Jason feels piloted when he goes inside, some automatic organisation of his limbs bringing him closer and closer to what he can’t even consider he might find. There’s a bed in the middle of the room. It’s not typical of hospitals, made of thin and wrought iron. As Jason approaches, he can see someone resting—sleeping—he can make out the rise and fall of breath under the white sheets, the angle of a nose, a jawline tucked in against a pillow—before his vision blurs past the point of any clarity.

He reaches out blindly, reflexively. He freezes before he can touch her.

He can’t move.

Jason feels footsteps from behind him, but he can’t turn around. Someone moves past him to stand by the side of the bed, discernible only in the blurred corners of his sight. He’s saying words that Jason has to roll his mind around before they make sense.

“At first I thought drugs. They pay American tourists to smuggle them across borders, they try to run off with them, they get shot. But I know who you are.”

Those final words pierce through the haze to resound sharply in his ears. Clinging onto them, Jason pulls himself back.

He looks up to meet the eyes of a doctor, presumably one of many working here. This one watches with a calm stare through his glasses like he’s been waiting for Jason to show.

Jason asks him, “Who have you told?”

“Only the man who you just spoke to.”

“Have the police been here?”

“Yes. They were looking for a body. They aren’t allowed in the ICU.”

“But they knew she was here?”

“Their photos were old. We didn’t have anyone matching their description.”

Breaking his gaze, the doctor looks down at the bed. He stretches out his hand to brush at a spot on her temple and Jason sees the partially shaved edge of her hair there. She’d never done that with him; they knew how long it would take to grow back, how distinctive it could look.

Jason sees a burn mark, faded but still dark against the skin. “It grazed her,” the doctor is saying, before looking back up at him. “How much blood did you see?”

Jason still can’t think of it without panic rising in his throat. “I don’t—we were underwater, it dissipated—”

“She’s very lucky,” the doctor says, speaking more gently than before. “It only just missed. Head wounds tend to bleed a lot. It’s a big mark. Would’ve gone straight through. She could be unrecognisable if it had, with the damage to her face.”

“She wasn’t breathing.”

The doctor pulls his hand away, rubs at his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “For a few minutes, maybe not.”

“I stood by the shore. They only brought up the car. I watched them. I waited."

“She was pulled onto a bank some distance from the bridge. The water can move quickly. She’s very lucky. But it will take time. It’s been two months. She was ventilated, she was in intensive care for weeks. Now, she is resting.”

“Has she—has she woken up?”

It’s unbearable to even ask. To even consider. What good is a life spent always on the run, trapped by an always-encroaching past, eroding any hope of living in the present? How different is it, really, if she can draw breath but only in this room?

The doctor looks at him unwaveringly as he clearly speaks a single word. “Yes.”

Jason swallows. He teeters on the verge of collapse. An unfathomable yet present possibility threatens to overwhelm him, and he pushes past it as best he can. It would be as unthinkable as the fate Jason's already consigned himself to these past eight weeks. But this is different. This would be more than he deserves.

He tries to turn back to safer, logistical ground. “You said you know who I am.”

The doctor doesn’t look frightened by the fact. “I do. I have family in London. I’ve been following the stories about you since that journalist was shot in the station.”

A pang of lesser guilt. “I tried to stop that.”

“Her, too?”

Jason doesn’t respond. He thinks to reach into his jacket pocket for what he has on him.

“Here,” he shoves a fistful of some currency in front of him, “take this.”

“You can’t pay for her.” He sounds affronted.

“She’s not safe here. They’ll come back. You’ve seen the news. They called her an accomplice. She wasn’t—they’ve been after her since we met, for things she was never part of. That bullet was meant for me. I couldn’t stop it, but I—I can get her away this time. I can get her safe. There’s family, but I need to not be followed. She needs that. If you can, just—please, take it.”

Jason waits. The doctor stares back at him. Around them, he gradually becomes aware of the sounds of life he couldn’t focus on before: scattered voices of other patients and staff down the hallway, the beeping of machinery, the droning of the late afternoon traffic outside. None of it matters, nothing else. Something Jason had abandoned is starting to return to him, some long-lost and cherished feeling rising through his limbs as he says again, “Please.”

 

 

ii. in between

january 2004, Goa

Jason doesn’t always wake her. Most nights, he suffers in silence, save a gasp when the dream ends and he’s thrust into consciousness. Marie almost never tries to rouse him herself—shaking his shoulders, whispering low and urgent in his ear, reminding him where he is. He knows she’d hesitate, anyway, caught in the memory of the time she tried in Izmir and he lurched up and pinned her down with an arm tight to her throat. It took weeks for the bruise to heal, days for Jason to sleep by her again—no matter how many times Marie told him that she understood, because she didn’t.

She tries. Tonight, Jason’s been sitting upright for maybe five minutes, staring ahead with his feet on the cool wooden floor, trying to steady his breathing without getting out of bed, when he feels a hand press on his shoulder, not tentatively. “Hey.” Marie sounds half-asleep still, a vague worry pulling her out of the darkness toward him.

“Go back to sleep. It’s fine.”

Jason knows instantly that he spoke too firmly. Marie’s hand drops and a moment later, he feels the bed shift as she moves to sit up. He hears the click of her turning on the old bedside table lamp, the faint and staticky hum it gives off, a few seconds before he sees the warm light pool in the corner of his eyes.

“Hey,” she says again.

It takes a moment to be able to turn to her. In the middle of the night, with the long, draping white curtains swaying in the gentle breeze coming in through the cracked open window, with the dimness of the lamp’s glow, Marie’s face looks soft and blurred at the edges. Almost unreal, still more incomprehensible in her reality than any nightmare, and Jason spends some time staring and letting the pieces of her assemble in his mind as though with a click.

Image set, Jason looks away again. He focuses on the shadows and light on the duvet, the way it bunches around Marie's legs and the way it smoothes out in the gap between them. He doesn’t move closer.

Between them, her hand flexes on the sheets. Voice calm, expectant. “What was it this time?”

“I told you before. It’s just the same thing as last time, nothing new.”

“But it was new before. Last time, you’d never seen it. Tell me again.”

“No. It’s pointless. Let’s just—we should just go back to sleep.”

It’s not an argument Jason normally wins. But something is different tonight, maybe the exhaustion in his voice or his shuffling gaze. Marie reaches for him. Jason can take her hand, but he can’t look her in the eye. She squeezes his fingers. He counts his breaths, slower now, in the time it takes him to squeeze back. Eventually, she pulls him in, and he lets her.

The next morning, while Jason makes them both coffee, Marie pointedly pulls the notebook from its drawer and leaves it out on the desk. It had been an early gift of hers. She bought it only a few weeks after they left Mykonos, telling Jason she’d noticed how much writing things down had helped in Paris. It had startled him, then, to remember how Marie had almost enjoyed the hours they spent in the freezing air that week, shuffling from phone booths to tentative leads, crossing out numbers as Jason dialled them and piecing together what they could of what had happened to him. It was all new still, untraversed roads that might lead anywhere.

For the first few months with her, Jason barely dreamt at all. His mind was too fraught with the risks he took every time he fell asleep; every time Marie fell asleep next to him. Over time, it got easier to close his eyes at night without planning how to best flee the room. The longer they stayed safe, sleep came easier and deeper, but so did the dreams. What was once every few months is now more like every few weeks. Marie’s frowns are deeper every time, her touch more insistent.

Jason’s not sure the writing helps. A few times he even asks Marie if she thinks it makes it worse. But he’s deprived her of enough; he’ll keep trying. She implores him, sometimes, as though a simple tattered notebook holds the key to peace he doesn’t think he could ever attain. But it seems cruel to deny her the chance to believe it might.

Earlier, he would have. In the beginning, he was always cautioning her, talking her out of her most optimistic assertions. The ones Marie offered so hesitantly to begin with, already aware of how he’d shoot her down. You know what I did, Jason reminded her over and over, like he was trying to get her to walk away from him. Don’t forget, they made me this.

Marie didn’t see it that way. She always believed there was another path: a future beyond the past’s reach. “You just have to keep trying,” she whispered at his side in the dark. She was always a warm and solid antidote to the shadowed recesses of his mind. A light Jason was always trying and failing to measure up to. “Sooner or later. I promise.”

-

november 2003, Goa

Jason chose Goa in part for their ability to blend in. Nowhere more so than in the spots already overwhelmed by other tourists and travellers. He prefers to aim for seclusion when they venture out together, but sometimes, the least remarkable thing is to be just another couple in the crowd. Like they could be anyone. The way Marie still hopes they can.

On nights like these, Jason thinks she almost believes it. Her happiness is infectious, as profound as the jewel-green ocean spilling as far as they can see. It makes it easier to let go a little, to give into Marie's warmth and her smile as she wraps herself around him. To pretend that this is all there is.

Jason's almost too caught up to hear the click of a shutter from somewhere to their side. Close enough he knows it couldn't be for anyone else. He stiffens so suddenly Marie says his name, concerned, the sound blurring into the pound of blood in his ears as he looks away from her, searching for the source.

The man who photographed them is standing some yards away on the sand. He's beckoning him over. Not surveying. Selling.

Tension recedes from Jason in waves, returning him to the present moment where he can half-murmur an apology. Pushing Marie away gently, making his way over, not with panic but with purpose.

He comes back to her a few minutes later. Marie's face shows an understanding of his abrupt shift—slowly crowded out by a dawning glow of delight when she sees what Jason's holding.

“It’s beautiful,” she tells him. Already reaching out for the photo, their fingers meeting as Jason closes the distance, sliding the film under her fingertips. Marie's touch is fleeting, like she’s afraid it will disappear.

She grabs his arm. “Does he have a copy?”

“I made him delete it.”

Marie frowns. “You don’t think it seemed odd to ask?”

“A little, but he probably just thinks I’m cheating on my wife or something.”

Laughing, “Maybe you are.” As soon as she's said it, Marie's face falls. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t—I just have to joke about it, sometimes.”

Jason still feels a little sluggish from earlier, and he doesn’t think he’s really reacted, but when Marie pushes herself into his space again, his arms rise automatically to encircle her. “I’m sorry,” she breathes hot against his cheek before pressing a kiss to it, “I’m ruining it. It’s beautiful, I—thank you.” She kisses his mouth. “I love you.”

Later that night, in bed, Marie curled against him with a book gradually slipping from her fingers as she falls asleep, Jason tells her, “There wasn’t anyone else.”

She starts, letting the book drop completely. Pressing a hand to his chest for leverage, pulling herself up to face him. “Jason, it was a stupid joke.”

Jason spreads his fingers over her shoulder. “I know, but you should know. I’m sure. I have all these fragments, even if they don’t make sense, but none of them are anything good.”

Marie bites her lip. Face shadowed, wary, like the idea upsets her. She moves her hand to cup Jason's jaw. “I keep telling you. There will be something good to remember. They didn’t kill all of you.”

Marie speaks low and vehemently like her words can make it so. But Jason knows it goes deeper than that; that she truly believes she’s merely voicing a truth. One she’ll believe because no one else could.

Rubbing his thumb into warm skin, “No one took care of me like you do.”

Her smile is slight and sad. “We’ll see.”

Jason knows Marie's not selfish enough to want the title, the burden, of the only good thing he’s ever had, a lone and unmarred spot amongst a burned out wreck. Marie doesn’t stay because she thinks she can sweep Jason's past aside but because she doesn’t need to. It’s as though her very conception of Jason blots it all out, irrevocably: a simple before and after where she only has to claim allegiance to one side.

Jason doesn’t know, can’t bear to know, how Marie rationalises it in her head, how she lies by his side night after night without fear. He wonders if it’s getting easier with time, or harder, as every new bit of information comes slowly to the surface, and none of them exonerate him at all the way she tries to. If he were braver, he’d ask. But he’s not. He won’t make her answer.

-

august 2003, Goa

He lets Marie sleep in the passenger seat beside him for as long as he can. He knows she must be exhausted from how long it took to get here. An endless stretch of weeks of cramped and sweltering boats and trains and buses, before finally gaining the silent privacy of the jeep he’s driving now.

Jason had a good reason for putting them through this. He planned the journey to be as complex and meandering as possible to give him the most assurance they wouldn’t be followed or predicted. Typically, they’d had their next destination chosen on the map before even setting foot in any city—but he wants this to be different.

He pulls in right by the veranda. The sun is setting, leaving long glowing shadows in its wake over the railings. Laughter and faint music drifts over from somewhere, but it’s distant; Jason wanted the privacy the canopy of foliage set against the porch walls provides.

He nudges Marie’s shoulder. When she barely stirs, he touches her face gently.

Her eyes flutter open. Her hair’s getting longer than he’s ever seen it. Pushing it off her forehead, she blinks at him. “Where are we?”

“We’re here,” is all he’ll say until she gets out of the car.

Jason hasn’t been inside yet. Marie stayed asleep while he stopped earlier and picked up the keys. It was a risk: handing over this much money at once, laying down anything that could be measured as roots—but it’s worth it for the way Marie goes still and silent watching Jason fiddle with the front door lock. It’s nothing they haven’t done a thousand times before, in what feels like as many places. But Jason knows Marie can sense—something about this time is new.

“I bought it,” he says finally as the door swings open to reveal the space inside. Marie’s eyes are wider than he’s seen them since she left him standing in the snow over a year ago.

Jason finds the light switch and presses it with some displaced trepidation to illuminate the cottage. It’s a small space—humble, quiet, tucked away as it is just off the shore, blanketed by gently swaying trees. Everything in it is blue or white or green. He can hear the ocean, hear Marie’s unsteady breathing as she walks forward, past the little kitchen to her right into the bedroom with its canopied bed, its adjoining bathroom tiled in pale and intricate geometric patterns. There were pictures in the listing Jason downloaded in an internet café in Varna a month ago, but it feels different to stand there. For it to be real.

Marie, too, is acting almost wary, more as she did entering his apartment in Paris—what was then a landscape of the complete unknown, and what quickly became a nightmare—than any of those that they’ve shared. “You bought this?” she asks without turning around.

“Well,” Jason calls after her, setting the keys on the kitchen island as he closes the door behind them, “it’s not like I wanted any paperwork to prove it, but…”

Silence. There are hardly any doors, but Marie's disappeared around a wall. Jason finds her in the bedroom, staring at the bed like it’s been a long time since she’s seen one. It’s a nice room—well-appointed in a way he thought she’d appreciate, with little shelves and a wooden chest at the foot of the bed. There’s a window above the headboard where the salt breeze drifts in, as it does from the ornate wrought window frames in the ensuite. It feels more cohesive than anywhere they’ve been since Marie's flat behind the shop she owned in Mykonos—isolated and freestanding rather than the anonymity of another apartment building. Jason tallies up any risk that brings as justifiable against the sight of watching Marie take it all in.

“In theory you own it too, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Marie’s stopped listening. She turns to him abruptly. “We can stay here?”

Jason tenses, and she sees it. Her shoulders slump slightly. Heartbeat picking up, he rushes to correct her before she can lose all the hope that had crept in.

“I don’t know for how long exactly,” Jason admits. “It’s still not…I mean, it can’t be forever. But I wanted…” he stutters, unable suddenly to lay the full scope of his offer at her feet, now seemingly paling in significance to what she’s already sacrificed.

Then he realises, with some confusion, that Marie is laughing. Relief punctures the dread in his chest and he smiles. “What?”

She grins at him, momentary lapse forgotten. She speaks with gentle admonishment. “Jason, you talk about the rest of your life sometimes like—like it’s already here. Already over. You do know you’re only 29? Or did you make that part up?”

“Well, maybe.”

Marie picks up a tassel pillow and tosses it at him.

-

Their new home is set right on the beach, a stone’s throw from gently lapping waves. That first night, Jason gets them into the ocean. He has to insist on it, although Marie’s only pretending when she complains about ruining her clothes; her shrieks when he finally tugs her into water deep enough to soak them both are of nothing but joy.

It’s dizzying, the rush of it, the lightness in her he almost forgot, marred as it was by the long months where this seemed entirely out of their reach. Now, Jason can’t get close enough to her. Her hair’s already half-wet when she presses their foreheads together, long strands of it wrapping around his neck, and Jason has to hold onto her waist tightly to keep them upright, feet planted firmly into the sand below.

Marie thanks him, murmuring the words almost into his mouth, and he tastes salt. There’s too much to apprehend. The immeasurable expanse of water that ripples around them, almost at one with the darkening sky. Marie’s gratitude, her love, palpable in the tight press of her hands on his shoulders, his neck, the way she won’t move their foreheads apart. As boundless as the ocean and equally unfathomable. Jason holds her close and thinks he could spend the rest of his life trying to deserve it.

-

june 2003, Tbilisi

“You could've joined us, you know.”

Marie's talking to him from the bathroom, her voice partially muffled by the sound of running water. Jason waits a minute and hears the sounds of her brushing her teeth. She'd been out all evening with a couple she befriended from a local market, who ran a clothing stall she'd started to frequent over the past month.

“It's just safer that I don't.”

He comes in as Marie spits into the sink, wipes her hand on the back of her mouth. She starts to take off her earrings—she wasn’t wearing them when she left; Jason hopes they were a gift. “Well, Renata’s a therapist, so I told her you really hate interacting with people and she suggested a few disorders you might have.”

“Any sound promising?”

Marie flashes him a smile as she pulls her dress over her head and tosses it somewhere to the side, followed by her underwear. Unable to help himself, Jason piles up the clothes from the floor and places them neatly in a woven hamper as she starts the shower.

Jason hadn’t really noticed it getting dark out, but taking off his watch to place on the window recess with the earrings, he sees that it's nearly midnight.

This bathroom’s bigger than the last few have been, the bathtub recessed into a tiled red alcove, bordered by weathered stone in sienna tones. Marie had fawned over it immediately—while Jason smiled and said nothing, unsure how long they’d be around to appreciate it.

But he’s trying. It’s been four weeks.

Marie hasn’t shut the shower curtain, and the warm and enveloping steam is already everywhere when Jason joins her under the rush of the spray. There’s never much pressure in any of the old, cheap apartment buildings they stay in, but the low and wide arc of the water makes it easier for it to blanket them both. Unsurprised, she leans into him immediately, wordlessly passing him a bottle of shampoo.

Jason smiles a little because it’s impossible not to remember the first time she did that. Unaccountably bold in asking him to rinse her hair when there was really no reason she couldn’t have done it herself—except of course for exactly the reason she had asked him.

Before that night, it's not like he hadn't thought about it: some pull always visible in the margins of their interactions, right from the beginning. He knew what inviting Marie up to his apartment in Paris sounded like, and so did she—but what awaited them there had banished that possibility to the edges of his mind. Locked it away as something Jason couldn't contemplate anymore, something he didn't deserve to want. Until Marie pushed it, insistently, overwhelming every other thought with her mouth and her touch and her refusal to let go.

They don’t do this often—Jason tends to wake up earlier, for one thing, and will usually go running first; Marie prefers the evenings and occasionally long baths, especially when she’s been out all day. He figures that starting a shower instead tonight was an invitation.

Marie confirms it the moment Jason's hands are on her scalp. Quiet but determined, like she’s been waiting to say it, she tells him, “I miss you.”

Jason gently tips her head forward into the water. He kisses the back of her neck when it’s rinsed clean. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”

She stays with her back to him. “That’s what I mean. I’ve barely seen you leave this place for three weeks, just this—what are you looking for?”

Marie means the pile of documents, old newspapers, scribblings and print-outs that had slowly started to overwhelm the little linoleum kitchen table. Jason's not sure it’s ever been so stark before: that he’d spend the days focused so exclusively on gathering data, almost only seeing Marie in the evenings when she returns from wherever she’s been. Jason tries to remember the last time they did anything together, and thinks about it so long that Marie turns around to face him, blinking against the spray.

He realises he’s gripping her hip, maybe a little too tightly as he tries to explain himself. “I’m getting somewhere with this one. I don’t want to lose focus, that’s all.”

“Jason." Faint exasperation, undercut by the enduringness of Marie's desire to understand him. "I don’t get it, sometimes, I just—I don’t think it’s better to remember. It still happened, if you remember it or not. Why not forget? What does it bring you, to remember?”

It’s hard to answer. Jason knows Marie means well, knows she truly wonders if there’s any point to it all; if he should have gone to all the trouble of finding her only to shift his focus so completely to figuring out what was left of his past. And she’s right, sometimes, that it would be better. To forget. To live in the moment. With her.

But he can’t. Always, something lurks, crowding out the foreground from behind. It visits him in dreams at night and during the day, it stalks him through every city they wander in, making him stop to categorise and second-guess and consider almost everyone they encounter. All at once, it grabs him by the force of recall: some far-off but unyielding sentiment that he’s been or done or seen something, somewhere, before.

Even when Jason's reaction is instantaneous, it’s a visible burden, one Marie measures in him in any number of ways. She’s always suddenly stopping her speech when she notices he’s staring just a little too intensely at someone nearby, or down a street, or simply into space.

It hurts her, he knows. Over and over again, he hurts her with what he can’t keep behind.

It’s not a burden Jason ever meant to share. From the moment he got into Marie's car, he shocked himself by how honest he was, how easy it was to tell her an impossible truth. That feeling never went away. He knows some of it stems from selfishness—but he’s trying to see the better side of it, too. The safety of a love he never expected to stumble into. One he doesn’t want to tarnish, though he fears every time the past pulls him away, it ebbs at something in Marie too.

This time, he lies to her and tells himself it’s for her own good. “I’ll try. I promise.”

-

april 2003, Izmir

For months, they’re constantly moving. Jason doesn’t make much more than a cursory effort to offer options, and eventually he gives up, resigning himself to the flatness in Marie’s eyes whenever she finds him with their few bags. They acquire new ones in every new city, always single and obvious in their purpose: something Jason never touches except to do this. Back in Mykonos, in a fit of optimism and maybe a little in mourning, Marie had filled the bank vault bag Jason left her with flowers. Something to remember him by, while she waited for him and told herself that she wasn’t. But Jason would never allow himself such mundanity. Instead, he hides them in a feeble attempt to delay the inevitable.

It’s not like he didn’t warn her they’d be leaving this city quickly.

He’d stuffed them under the bed only three weeks ago. Now, he kneels against a little patterned rug to drag them out, noticing with some remorse that Marie had just changed the sheets that morning.

“I’m sorry,” Jason tells her pointlessly; what good is apologising when it’s never going to change anything? They’d managed almost two months in Genoa, but less than one in Durrës, and Marie had never settled here in Izmir at all. Never even tried. Something worn in her now, not pushing back.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.” Jason means to sound rueful. He doesn’t. His words ring accusatory in his ears instead. As though any of this is her fault. As though Marie's continual presence isn't more unbelievable than being pulled out of the Mediterranean in the first place. As though being with her isn't all it means to be alive, now.

Marie knows all of that. “Yes, I do.”

“I mean it. Marie, it’s not going to stop.” Jason knows she can hear, I won't.

Wordlessly, Marie slides open a drawer from the only dresser in the tiny bedroom they’ve been sharing. Starts picking up folded clothes like it's an automatic, practised movement. The way he would.

Jason says her name, more urgently this time. His own hands suddenly can’t pack anything.

She doesn’t turn around. “I meant it, too. I love you. I’m going with you.”

“Don’t say that.”

Marie laughs without any humour.

A sharp stab of regret for how he sounded makes Jason rush to correct himself. “No, no, I didn’t mean—I meant, don’t say it like it’s that simple. It’s not.”

“What, like ‘I pay, you drive’ wasn’t simple?”

He has nothing to say to that.

Marie stays with her back to him. For a few minutes, she sorts through clothes in silence, but Jason watches her movements start to fray. Her hair hasn’t been red for months, but the late afternoon light filtering in through the half-window above bathes her in a warm glow. When she turns, she moves sharply, and her eyes are bright with determination.

“You’re spending your whole life running from a choice you don’t remember making. Don’t run away from this, too. You came and got me. You knew I’d go with you. You didn’t have to, but you did. You wanted to.”

His mouth goes dry. “Yes.”

“Well, I want that, too. I want to be with you. I want this. You need to accept that I want this. It’s okay.”

Marie sounds pleading, urgent, but Jason can’t make himself answer her the way she wants to hear.

“It’s not.”

She’s the only thing he has, the only thing he wants to have. But he feels the price of it in every moment. Too many of them that make her sound like this.

Yet there’s something beyond guilt. It’s there in the way Marie is closer, now, almost crouching to meet Jason where he’s still hunched over their bags, hand hovering over his back like she won’t let herself touch. It’s there in the low pitch of her voice, the fevered hum of it as she reminds him, not for the first time, why she’s doing this. Why they are. “It can be. We can make it better. You and me. That’s why you came back.”

-

march 2003, Durrës

Standing in line for a sculpture exhibition, a woman behind them touches Marie’s arm and asks her, “Ich liebe dein Armband, wo hast du es he?”

Jason assumes she must have heard Marie swearing. They’ve been in line a long time.

The woman’s face is sun-weathered and friendly, and she’s on her own. Marie lights up at the kindness, telling her the bracelet she’s wearing was a gift from her boyfriend who doesn’t speak a word of German. Jason smiles blandly, looks away. Letting them chat with an informal ease he hasn’t heard in a while, almost too fast for him to follow.

He thinks about leaving them to it. Marie practically had to beg him to come to this, anyway. Jason would rather not stand in the same public place with her, unmoving, for this long—even though this gallery is tiny, out of the way, and doesn’t have any CCTV—he checked.

Marie’s still turned away from him. Deep in conversation with her new friend about another museum she should see that's just like this one. Tapping her shoulder, Jason notes how much she starts when she turns. Like she’d forgotten everything, just briefly. He wants her to. Voice light as he suggests, “Why don’t you guys go on in? I’ll meet you back at the apartment.”

Marie looks at him searchingly. The moment stretches between them, a sudden bereft space where her words had previously been overflowing. Uncomprehending, the woman asks if everything’s okay. Marie only glances over. "Alles in Ordnung. Moment mal."

Jason keeps his face blank, but he nods at Marie, just slightly. The gratitude in her face is hampered by caution. Eventually she says, “Alright. If you’re sure.”

He kisses her cheek goodbye just to feel the way she relaxes into it a little. Turns to excuse himself past the people behind them in line, walks out into the shadows of the adjoining alleyway and disappears.

-

It takes a few hours for Marie to return to him. Jason hears the door shut from where he’s bent over an old coffee table in the living room, carefully gluing bits of a passport together. Marie's keys clink reassuringly as she hangs them on a hook on the wall. She comes through the doorway to find him like she knew exactly where he’d be.

“I’m still alive, by the way," she announces.

Jason doesn’t glance up from where his fingers are busy slotting pieces into place. “Looks like it.”

“I just mean she wasn’t some deep cover agent.”

Jason presses, gives the glue a moment to bond, looks up at Marie where she’s standing just above him. She’s teasing, at least, smiling a little. Still relaxed from her brief excursion into normalcy.

“Yeah, I don’t think they’ve cracked that demographic yet.”

Jason lifts his fingers, wipes the residue on his shorts and examines the resulting document. He thinks it will suffice for most modes of transport, but they should stay away from planes. It’s the best he could come up with—he’d had to make do with whatever materials he could get his hands on, carefully weighing up what he could afford to lose from the stash of identification he found in the vault. He figures Marie deserves it—that he sacrifices some identities for her, too.

Of course, her loss is greater. After all, she’d only had one life to leave behind.

Marie doesn’t know what he’s thinking. Sounding light when she suggests, “You know, you could use a hobby.”

“I’ve got a couple. Here.” Finished studying it, Jason passes over the burgundy book for her to take.

“This doesn’t count. Ever thought it might be nice to speak to someone other than me?”

“Not really.”

She smiles, only slightly, focusing on flipping through Jason's handiwork. “I’m Italian now?”

“In theory. Might have some problems convincing them on the language part.”

“I didn’t go to school all that much.”

“Not one word?”

“Enzima.”

“Yeah, that’ll get you through customs.”

Marie tosses the sum of Jason's efforts onto the table, breaks off any protest by immediately draping herself over him on the couch. She’s still sun-warm from hours outside in the early spring air. A dizzying reminder of the world at large, the scope of it narrowed to the brush of her nose against Jason's cheek as she murmurs into his ear, “I think you’re impressive enough. Not that you use it. When’s the last time you’ve said something romantic to me in French?”

“Tu m’étonnes. Je continue d’attendre que tu me quittes, mais tu restes.”

Marie smiles in imagined understanding. “Was that romantic?”

Jason reaches for her. “Very.”

-

december 2002, Genoa

Marie finds Jason in the bathroom at three in the morning, brushing his teeth as aggressively as if they were stained with blood. She doesn’t say anything, at first. Just leans on the thin and peeling wooden doorframe and bites her lip, watching him.

Jason isn’t surprised she’s awake. They didn’t go out that day. Instead, Marie made him tell her everything he was piecing together from the night before, show her the pages, watch as her fingers traced every word and her brow furrowed and any justifications or mitigations died in her throat.

Jason thought about refusing her, but it seemed unfair. As much as he doesn’t want to weigh Marie down with a bloodied history that’s his alone, he knows equally that he can’t justify withholding the truth from her. Not after all Marie's doing for him. Everything she’s accepted.

Eventually she asks, “Do you think it’s a good idea to try and remember?”

Marie’s worried it’s been two nights in a row. The first night, Jason tried and failed to fall back asleep, resigned to spending fitful hours awaiting dawn and writing in the notebook. Everywhere they go, Jason makes some time to get away, to hunt down any information he can without leaving a trace of having done so. Mostly, he starts by visiting eccentric shopkeepers who have stockpiled years of newspapers, combing through them to find articles on unexplained, politically sensitive deaths in Europe in the past ten years. Until he’s discerned enough to create a list he can actually research, carefully snipping cuts to glue into the notebook, heedless of how dangerous it’s becoming as evidence. He won’t visit the same library or internet café more than once, which is limiting—but less so than Marie’s baleful stare.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“You do,” Marie says so quietly he almost doesn’t hear over the sound of running water.

He shuts off the tap. “What, you think the answer is to repress it?”

Jason slides past Marie without trying to touch her or calm her. Even though he can physically feel her unease and concern, emanating from her in incessant waves. It’s a rebuff she doesn’t deserve; Jason hears the hurt in her voice when she calls after him, “I thought you told me you wanted to forget.”

Almost a year ago, now, and the conversation feels countless miles away. Jason spends a moment hating himself for the fact. He remembers how clear it all seemed then: that the past didn’t matter at all, only his one chance of a future.

Marie gave it to him, in the end. But Jason can’t let himself hold onto what she’s offering.

This apartment has a little balcony. He’d had his doubts—it would be perfect for someone with a long-distance lens to look inside—but the curtains are long and he keeps them shut, despite Marie’s protests that they’re wasting the view. Now, in darkness, Jason pulls them back. Opening the door lets in a swift rush of cold night air. Too late for there to be any sound but the waves.

He wishes he still felt like he had that night. “It’s not that simple.”

“It was when you asked me to be with you, and I said yes.”

Marie's voice echoes slightly by the sink. Jason listens as her weight against the bathroom door frame shifts, as the paraquet floorboards in the room creak under her feet as she walks over to stand behind him. “I’m not blaming you,” she says before he can respond. “I’m just saying—you need to decide how much you want to know. If it’s really the right choice, to keep looking.”

Silence. Jason thinks, they're always somewhere overlooking the ocean. He breathes it in so deeply Marie must hear the sound.

“Does that help?”

“Not really. Makes me think about getting fished out.”

“You know, we don’t have to be on the coast every time.”

Jason closes the door. He shuts the curtains, and finally, he looks Marie in the eye. Her worry seems subdued, but it leaves something darker in its wake: a grim acceptance he doesn’t want to be responsible for.

“Lots of tourists. A lot of movement of people in and out, every day. Makes it easier to blend in.” Stepping closer, reaching to thumb at her cheek apologetically. After a moment, Marie leans into the gesture. The resultant rush of relief is immediate and deep, hitching Jason's breath. He holds onto the feeling enough to murmur, “And you like it.”

-

october 2002, Sarajevo

They’ve only been in Sarajevo for three weeks when Jason notices the same man sitting near him in a coffee shop. The first visit was for coffee, and he only noticed him the way he noticed everyone: sat at the same wide table as Jason had been but poised just a little too far from him in the crowded, cramped space to not have been deliberate; a distance most people would close without thinking. The second time, five days later, Jason went inside just to see if he would show again. He did. There’s nothing about the man that doesn’t fit with his surroundings, except that he’s there.

He’s already packing when Marie finds him that afternoon.

“I don’t understand. Jason, did he even say anything to you?”

“No. He’s not going to. He’s just going to kill me the first chance he gets.”

“You don’t know that,” Marie insists.

“Yes, I do.” Jason repeats it like a mantra, all the reasons he has to know what lies in wait should he ever forget them. “I’m an unrestrained threat. The biggest they have. These people don’t like loose ends.”

“How would they even know? We just got here. How could they have already found you?”

“They have—at any time, dozens of operatives worldwide, who knows how many government employees behind them, networks on top of that—they can do whatever they want, and it’s not that hard to track people if you know what you’re looking for. Especially if they know I’m with someone.”

“They might not think we’re together.”

“They’ll figure it out. They’ll have been keeping tabs on you. They’ll know you’re not where you used to be. Then they can’t find you, and they know they didn’t kill you, so…”

“But maybe they were never looking for me," Marie counters. Jason wonders how much time Marie devoted to building that belief. "Why would they? I’m not anything to them.”

“It’s not about who you are to them," he reminds her flatly, zipping the bag shut. "It’s about who you are to me. They’d do whatever it takes to get me out in the open.”

He hasn’t looked at Marie while they’ve been arguing this point. He does now, and stops still. Marie looks coldly furious in a way Jason hasn’t seen in a long time. Since he had to shove her against a shop front grate to stop her getting them caught. Since she’d asked, bitingly, if he was planning on killing her at the end of all this.

Her face is stony but her voice borders on hysterical, like when she first realised the target Jason had painted on them both. “If it’s such a risk, why even bother? Why not just hand yourself over to them now?”

“Marie.” He surprises himself by sounding afraid of her.

“No, I mean it. You can’t go through life like this. Always looking over your shoulder, never thinking that maybe you did manage to get away—“

“The moment I think that, it’s over. I’m gone.”

“Then what’s it for? You’re just gonna pick somewhere new to run every six months for the rest of your life, however long that is, huh?”

“Marie, I told you—”

She isn’t listening anymore. He calls after her, pointlessly, as she leaves the small apartment, slamming the door in her wake.

Jason sits on the edge of the thin, cheap bed and waits. He leaves the curtains open. The room goes dark in stages, illuminated finally only by the unearthly glow of the street lamps outside.

He doesn't move for three hours. The door opens.

When Marie enters, her face is wet, but she still looks angry as she shuts the heavy door behind her—quietly, this time.

Wordlessly, she sits down next to him. Neither of them look at each other as they sit in silence. Jason thinks about her stepbrother’s: the ghostly figures they must have cut in the childrens’ bedroom, illuminated in moonlight for their first whispered argument in the dark.

That night, Jason asked Marie to leave everything for him and she said she didn’t know if she could. Now, her words carry the weight of knowledge she should never have gained when she tells him softly, “There’s more than one way to lose yourself to them.”

Jason glances at her sideways. “Or you.”

“Or me.”

Marie's still not looking at him, staring down at her hands on her lap. Jason reaches out his own. After a moment, she takes it.

When he laces their fingers together, he feels all at once the urgency of confession. “When the police first came after us, do you remember, I told you—I said I was trying to do the right thing. You said no one does. Nobody does the right thing. And I knew that I’d—that I should never have gotten in your car. I kept asking myself, for six months, what was right. If I should find you. If I should just let you try and get away. And I got selfish. Just like when I gave you the money. I didn’t know then, I had no idea, but I knew there was something wrong. I told myself you’d be fine, and I really believed it, but I knew I was taking a risk. That you were.”

“Yeah, well, there aren’t a lot of legal ways to hand someone that much in cash.”

Marie sounds resigned to what isn’t her fault, and Jason pushes back. “But you’d never have thought…”

“I said yes, didn’t I?”

“I told you. Some things you can’t agree to. No one can.”

For the first time since she came in, Marie looks at him. She looks at Jason just like she had in her car, almost daringly, when she told him to figure it out. When she first gained some idea of what it was that was chasing him but didn’t walk away. She still isn’t. Jason feels momentarily amazed by how much she’s faced head on, how much she’s agreed to. Marie could have run so many times—he's tried to encourage her, even. But Jason's starting to understand how far she’s committed herself to this—to him—and he’s more grateful for it than he thinks he could ever express.

“Well then,” Marie says finally, “I guess it’s lucky for you I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.”

Jason doesn’t make her leave that night. He kisses her fiercely. Cupping her cheek, drawing her in. Marie caves. She yields to Jason's touch as easily as he first did to her own. Coarse movements, her breath harsh and halting against his lips when she pulls away, already unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. Pushing it onto the floor, cold palms over his bare chest as she beckons his mouth to hers again. She drags him to her, possessive, forgiving; she makes Jason apologise like he did the first time he'd ever endangered her. After—Marie sleeps against him while Jason whispers things she can’t hear. That there’s no point running without something to live for.

They stay another two weeks, and the nightmares start.

-

july 2002, Amalfi

At first, having Marie makes everything easier, even running. When it comes to choosing a new city, her excitement is almost out of place—but it's welcome, to the extent that it masks the shadow of why it is that they need to keep moving.

Initially, she delights in the opportunity to visit places she’s never been. They don’t go that far to begin with, merely trading the shores of Greece for those of Italy.

With how intense everything became in Paris, and how suddenly so, Jason almost forgot what it was like to just listen to Marie talk. Just like she did while driving him hundreds of miles, she talks to him. She tells him stories. They wind through stone paths and under archways, seeking refuge from the height of the summer sun, drifting into little paths overrun with flowering bushes and lemon trees. All while Marie talks about herself and her history like it’s still reachable. Like she hasn’t left all of it behind.

She explains that her father died when she was a child and she never got along with the man her mother remarried—Eamon’s father. “He was always calling me lazy and spoiled, and we fought a lot. I walked out when I was sixteen. I stayed with some friends the rest of high school. Bounced between a few until we all got bored enough to try and get degrees. Mostly, we just used student loans to travel. We used to get trains all over Europe, but we had to come back eventually or they wouldn’t let us graduate, and we knew we needed that for visa applications.”

Jason notices a group of people up ahead on the path they’re on. They’re nothing to worry about, only tourists like they’re trying to imitate—but he cautions Marie with a touch to her arm. He doesn’t want her to mention Eamon where they could be overhead; it’s a common enough name, maybe, but his farmhouse is the last place the people looking for them can pinpoint them both.

Their setting now couldn’t be more different than the frigid place where they parted back then. But still lurks that same fear, the same urgency to protect her, no matter what it cost. Jason watches it diminish Marie’s light a little as she remembers. She nods.

Later, when they’re alone, he asks her to tell him again. She’s waiting for some hair dye to take effect, perched on the edge of the bath with a cheap paperback she’s only half-reading, one she shuts to speak to him.

Early evening sun from the skylight window illuminates the tiled floor Jason sits on as he listens to her. “I was closer with Martin, but he didn’t really stand up for me. He was scared. He just wanted us to accept our new family, but I couldn’t. My mother always preferred him, because he just shut up and listened. I was angry for a long time, but I get it now. People act funny when they’re grieving.”

She'd looked up at Jason when he came in the room, but now she stares unbrokenly at a fixed point on the shower curtain. She speaks almost like Jason isn’t there to hear her. “I haven’t seen Martin in over a year. I sometimes think about writing a letter, and then I stop.”

Looking back at him, Marie misreads the pain on his face. She apologises when she’s not the one who should. “I’m sorry—maybe I shouldn’t bring it up.”

“What?”

“Family.”

Jason shrugs. Glancing away. It’s bewildering to think Marie’s concern would be for him in that regard, but she presses, “You must have had one.”

He shakes his head. “If I did, I doubt we were close. Whenever I agreed to this, I’m sure they told me I couldn’t ever see them again.”

“Maybe you didn’t have a choice.”

“Marie,” he says warningly. It’s not yet familiar territory, but he’s already wary of what she’s trying to do. To tell herself he must have been forced. To deny him recrimination in a way Jason knows—even with so much of the exact details still lost to him—he wouldn’t deserve.

Since admonished, he sees a different reflection creep back into Marie’s face: the connections she’s given up. The people she might never see again.

Desperate to distract her, Jason moves closer. “Hey. This doesn’t have to be—we don’t need to think about why all the time. We can just go to new places. Together.” Jason hesitates, not wanting to undermine the risk she’s taking for him, but he adds, “What were you doing before we met?”

“That was different. I was with friends, usually. We were just being kids. Seeing as much of the world as we could.”

“Well, I don’t remember most of the places I’ve seen.”

No response. He touches her fingers where they’re curled around the book’s spine.

Marie speaks almost to herself, softer. “I was having fun. I wasn’t worried about anything. If I started to worry about anything, I just left. That’s all you can do, is worry.”

Jason pries her fingers away, lets the book fall with a soft thump onto the colourful linen bathmat, and holds her hand. “Not all.”

-

june 2002, Mykonos

That first month, Jason makes Marie close up the store early and lay out a map, draped over a cluster of tables in the shop where customers would wait with coffee. He asks her to mark everywhere she’s lived, then everywhere she’s visited, then everywhere anyone she’s known well is from.

At this, she baulks. “Jason, we have something called the European Union.”

“Yeah, I think someone explained that to me.”

“What’s the point of—you really think they’re going to put in this much effort? Now?”

Jason hesitates. “You’re the only lead they have.”

Guilt sticks in his throat at the words; he knows he’s admitting what he’s brought to her. How he couldn’t let Marie go, despite the consequences it could bring. Repercussions neither of them can really predict—but that he knows are worth fearing.

“Still. You could be anywhere, and so could I.”

“You’re not anywhere. You’re maybe 2,000 miles away from where I last saw you, but you’re still on the same continent. Only a few borders along.”

“You’re saying we can’t go anywhere in Europe?”

“I’m saying we can’t go here,” Jason points to Spain, where Marie had scribbled somewhat aggressively, “or here—what do you have against Belgium?”

She winces and mumbles something in German he doesn’t catch, focusing more on the ratcheting tension in her shoulders. Again, that unbearable sense of responsibility for leading her to this, and he speaks as much to convince himself as her.

“Hey.” Jason bends a little closer and Marie lifts her head to look at him. “I’m just being cautious. I do think we should leave. But we don’t need to go that far. Anywhere you have a strong connection is out, but we—we can figure it out. Somewhere else.”

Marie stares back at him. She worries her lip. When she opens her mouth, Jason expects some argument, or some resignation. Instead she asks him, “Where did you go? The past six months?”

Jason knows why she put off asking, the death she was afraid to hear him recount. But what he fears isn’t telling her but what made her ask now. As though she believes, after approaching a month sharing a bed, that the answer can’t be that bad. That in every night slept alongside him, the death in him diminishes. Swirling away into a past Marie can distance them from with every shared breath.

 

 

i. the beginning

may 2002, Mykonos

Jason waits as long as he can to say anything, which turns out to be only a couple of weeks. Every customer has him on edge, lurking at a weathered, cyan table with long-cold coffee as he turns over their innocuous comments in his mind, eyes unable to stop scanning every face that comes in. The impulse comes in part from instincts drilled into him from a still-unknowable force, in part from that same first surge of protectiveness when he dragged Marie down a spiral staircase six months ago. The latter is newly returned to him. Foisted where he had nothing to contend with for six months of solitude. A burden he’s taken on that’s more freeing than the lack of it could ever be.

His first night, he slept for twelve hours. He was alarmed, half-embarrassed, while Marie wasn’t apologetic in the slightest for having let him—though her smile was a lot more smug than when she first knocked on her car window to rouse him on the banks of the Seine.

Now, he wakes earlier and earlier with every passing day. What was at first convenient, an excuse to go for a run on the sun-soaked beaches while Marie attended to getting the shop open, is now a punishment. The town she chose is idyllic: clustered white buildings dotted for miles along an endless shore, the salt breeze fraying and warm—but Jason speeds past it all and feels trapped, hunted, a weight that never went away pressing at his back, spurring him further and further across an endless expanse.

“I don’t know how much longer I can stick around.”

In his arms, her back to him, Marie stirs. Jason realises with some regret that she was already half-asleep.

Their heads are as close together as they've been every night, something clinging them to each other in sleep these past few weeks: a shared sense of the unbelievability of being together again. Already afraid to lose what he's only just regained, Jason noses into her hair and murmurs, “It wasn’t that difficult, you know. Finding you, I mean.”

“That’s not what you said.” Her response is hot and muffled against his forearm.

“I just mean,” Jason tells Marie as she lifts her head off of his arm, shifts over on her side to face him on the faded blue pillow, “if I did it, someone else could.”

“Well, I only have one passport.”

He stares at her. He swallows. She looks determined, gearing up for a fight. He doesn’t want to argue with her. He touches her face, thumbs near her chin. She softens.

“I don’t want them to find you. I don’t know if they’re looking yet but—they will.”

“So take me with you.”

An indescribable emotion blooms in his chest. Tighter than the apprehension when he’d first entered the shop, more affecting than the relief when she first kissed him again. “You said you didn’t know. I asked you if we could hide, and that’s all you said. You didn’t know.”

Marie frowns. “You mean at Eamon’s?”

“Yeah.”

“God, is that what this is about? Jason, you know what I’d just found out about you. What you’d found out about yourself!”

Jason's breath hitches. “So you’re saying you’d consider it?”

“I am saying,” Marie speaks very slowly and patiently, almost as though to a child, "take me with you.”

Something in Jason resists the irrepressible pull of her words. He extracts his arm from under her head, pulls to sit upright against the headboard. Marie follows immediately—but he looks down at the sheets and away from her when he says quietly, “I don’t know if you can even agree to that.”

“You said that before," she reminds him in a soft tone. "You said almost exactly that. You don’t think I’ve asked myself? I spent months asking. I was sure I’d never see you again, but—I did." Marie smiles, shyly, laying her fingers lightly over his wrist. "You came back. You found me. I heard your voice again, and I knew I’d say yes.”

“It might never—they might never stop looking. You could never have a normal life again.”

“It’s not going to be that bad.”

Jason lifts his head to her. “Yes,” he says deliberately, intent on making her believe him, “it will.”

Marie quiets, and Jason feels the sudden distance between them like an ache as she considers and as he holds his breath. Eventually, she asks in a low voice, “If I don’t go, I never see you again?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you can’t promise. You don’t think it’s safe to keep coming to the same place.”

Jason knows it isn’t safe to be here as surely as he knows he doesn't want to be anywhere else. From the moment he was dragged out of the water, all that mattered was finding out the truth of who he was. Only one thing—one person—had ever managed to overcome that. Something he couldn’t endure being without, as it seemed he would sooner endanger her life than forgo the possibility of being a part of it.

Jason doesn’t know how to admit that to her, but Marie acts as though she knows. She doesn't. She can’t possibly comprehend the full extent of what he’s asking her to do. She was right the first time.

Like the last time he asked, Marie cups his face and tilts it gently toward her. This time, she surprises Jason by asking, “What else would I do?”

It’s the easiest rationalisation he has, and he reaches for it. As tainted as Marie is already—she has to keep her head down, remember when he’d told her nothing familiar. Maybe, it isn’t being kind to her to keep away. Maybe they’re all each other has left, and what good would it do to pretend otherwise?

For now, Jason nods slowly. It takes Marie a moment to register before her eyes widen. Understanding apparent in how desperately she kisses him.

“Let’s give it another week,” she murmurs when they’ve resettled under the sheets, already half-asleep again from the sound of it. “I still haven’t got you onto a scooter.”

 

 

iv. what lies ahead

april 2004, Goa

Jason remembers a hospital in Moscow. He thought he might die there, and he dreamed accordingly: no longer indistinct images of a fragmented past but of Marie in vivid, lucid colour. He thinks he dreamed of Pam, too, inexplicably sitting across from him in a chair like the one he’s in now, pushing an unmarked folder towards him that he knew contained all the answers he’d ever need.

Answers he's since mostly remembered. It’s not that they don’t matter—they do. After all, Jason spent years so haunted by the lack of them that he could focus on little else. But something greater marks him now. Something he could hardly bear to acknowledge the last eight weeks. Something that never really managed to lead him definitively away from everything he couldn't remember—but instead led him here, now, to this moment where all he can do is sit on a narrow and uncomfortable wooden chair someone had brought him and hold Marie's hand and think—that he’ll do it all differently, this time. That he’ll try at last to push the past aside.

Jason sleeps. He doesn’t mean to. Driven to it from sheer exhaustion and a familiar safety he never thought he’d feel again. He can’t remember the last time he slept without dreaming.

He wakes to a hand gripping his more tightly than he’s ever felt.

Surging forward, his throat shuts tight; all he can do is stare at the impossible.

Marie’s eyes are wet with the tears from a dawning realisation of what must be written in every line of Jason's face. Her head only just lifts from the pillow beneath it, her whole body trembling with the rapid rise and fall of her chest under the thin sheet. “Jason,” she whispers in a ragged breath, sounding as urgent as if they were still in that car, as if the world had suddenly resumed around them. She swallows. “You didn't know I was alive.”

For a long moment, Jason can't say anything at all. He’s only distantly aware of the pain from how tightly she’s clutching his hand.

“No.”

Marie breathes out harshly, injured. She shuts her eyes. Slumps back into the bed, submerged again.

Her voice is thin, dragged out. “I wasn’t sure. I thought…maybe you thought it was safer to stay away. I didn’t know how long—”

The idea of abandoning her deliberately spikes dizzying distress. Vehemence makes it easier to speak. “No. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

The forcefulness of Jason's words seems to calm Marie slightly. As though reminding her of a deep and restarted commitment; Jason watches its significance sink into her. Eyes still shut tight, tears still tracking down the side of her face but diminishingly, ebbing away. Breathing out again, the sound approaches relief. Jason marks it along with all the other unbelievable signs of returned life: the slower-swelling of Marie's chest, the shifting line of her throat as she swallows as if to right herself.

Turning her head on the pillow to look at Jason, moving more assuredly than she did before, Marie murmurs, "It's okay." Giving weight to that single word, like it's the only thing she needs to tell him.

He doesn't feel that way. Whatever barrier was in Jason is splintering, and the enormity of what he needs to tell Marie pushes against his mouth, a deluge so vast he doesn’t know where to start. “It’s not. I’m so sorry—”

“Hey,” Marie whispers.

“I should have—I should have protected you. I should have figured it out. He never should have—”

She interrupts him by asking quietly, “Did you kill him?”

“Yes. No. He—I’ll explain, but yes, he’s dead.”

Marie looks at him searchingly, trying to apprehend what she can from the weeks of separation. Jason will tell her everything, make her decide again with all the knowledge he can possibly give her. But she cuts to the essential when she asks him, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

Jason knows what she means by that, and he doesn’t want to add to the confusion she must be feeling. But he needs to tell her what he knows, now—that he’d already found all he needed, long before the car sank into the river.

“Yes.”

She swallows. “So it can be over?”

Her voice cracks. It’s unbearable to witness: a secret Marie kept from him for twenty too-short months that she doesn’t have the strength to hide anymore. A burden Jason never should have made her share, even if she’d agreed to it because who could ever agree to that? How could he possibly deserve that she had even tried?

Marie hasn’t let go, but it’s looser, and Jason lifts her hand to speak against it. Lips flush against the edge of her knuckles, body warm and responsive as her fingers flex against his skin. “Yes," Jason promises her, "It’s over. It always should have been—I’m sorry. I love you. God, I—I missed you so much. I didn’t know—I should have—”

It could be too much for Marie to listen to in that moment; face open and tender with sympathy but tightening, too, with pain. Jason doesn't want to overburden her with things it's his fault he felt. He imagines she must have struggled to really rest in this place, without answers or awareness of what could follow.

But pulled from that unending pause, an intent returns to her. Marie slackens her fingers slightly in his grip so she can shift them, press the tips of them against Jason's mouth instead. Silencing him as solidly as he thinks she's able to.

Marie whispers, “Ssh. Later, okay? We should leave. Let’s just go home.” She thinks to question it. “Can we?”

Jason hesitates. He remembers what he’d said: that it couldn’t be forever. It still can’t. He knows not enough has changed. He’s not sure if it ever could.

But he wants to believe in a new possibility. Technically, the only major search efforts for them both right now intend only to find their bodies. But more than that, his assessment is different now: the risks posed by the imminent danger of all those that pursued him—versus the slow collapse he courted himself every moment he couldn’t bring his mind away from what Marie tried to get him to abandon.

For the first time in two years, the balance shifts, and Jason thinks he’ll do anything to move on. Now that he’s exposed them as far as he can. Now that he has a second chance.

Marie was right when she told him there was more than one way to lose himself. But there was only ever one way out of it.

“Yes,” Jason tells her without any reservation. It doesn’t matter—they’ll need to find somewhere else as soon as they can, but it’s not a place. It never was. “Yes, we can.”

-

There’s paperwork Jason refuses to sign. As for the hospital forms, he realises total anonymity for a collected patient would only raise more questions, but he easily remembers the catalogue of identities he created, even the ones he burned.

An old consciousness is creeping in, suddenly wary of everyone who’s seen his face. He supposes it'll take some weeks still for the story to really break through, as all the pieces settle. He thinks they need to get as far away as she can manage, but first, they need to go home.

-

Marie isn’t so steady on her feet, but she tells Jason she’s been getting better. She says she’d gotten up every day for the last few weeks, but it was harder to motivate herself when she had no idea what had happened, or what would come next.

When Jason closes the car door behind him, she asks with some suspicion how he got it.

“There's a Hertz at the airport. I used your ID, so we should be fine.”

The casualness of a deadpan comment is unexpected, and she startles slightly. “You feeling alright?”

Jason pulls them out onto the road. He adjusts the mirror so he can see Marie's reflection in it. He reaches out to take one of her hands again, and she laces their fingers immediately. “Yeah, I'm fine.”

The inundation is slipping away, leaving his mind clearer to plan ahead as the relatively empty highway unveils before them. “Listen. That doctor seemed like he cared about you. I gave him everything I had. But I'm not going to count on him not telling someone. There have been newspaper stories, reports with our faces. It's not just Interpol anymore. They might not think we’re alive, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop right away. We have to—”

Jason can see with a glance that he’s saying too much for Marie to take in, and he stops. There will be time to explain everything later. They have time. “I'm sorry. I need to think. Just for a little while. They didn’t find it; I’ve checked. We can't go into the town, but the house should be—look, I’ll figure it out, our next step, but we just need somewhere to rest. Just for now.”

“That's how it always starts.”

Marie’s tone—gentle, almost teasing—isn’t at all what Jason expected; and it takes him looking over at her and seeing her tentative smile to realise what she’s referring to. How those are almost the same words Jason said to her in her car in Paris, the first thing she ever walked away from for him; towards something neither of them knew they were starting.

He’s not sure he ever really believed that he had her. If he ever let himself. This time, he tries to commit every aspect of her to memory again, no longer something he has to edge his mind around. More beautiful than any photo could capture, more unattainable than any answers except for the fact that she’s here, now. With him.

Jason stares so long Marie nudges his shoulder. Speaking more surely as she reminds him, “Careful of the road. I don’t want to go back to the hospital already.”

-

Marie doesn’t want any food, but she asks to get in the shower right away. In the quiet cascade of warm water, she leans against him, this time out of necessity.

Jason’s still moving as though on autopilot. Robotic in the way he used to be, the way he'd relied on these past two months—a mechanism Marie had always broken through. She was always so alive, in all the ways Jason wasn't. Ways he didn't know how to be, until she showed him.

But not now. Jason still can’t believe it's real. That she’s here. The disbelief stiffens his movements and clouds his mind. It takes him a full minute spent with his hands lathering Marie's hair to realise she’s asking him, “Can you get the scissors?”

He wishes she'd forget about that for one night. “We can do it later.”

“No," Marie insists, more firmly than he's heard her yet. "I want to be rid of it. I haven’t washed it in months—and we need to anyway, right?”

Jason's hands tremble as they slide down her skin. “Okay.” He can barely get the word out.

Over two years since he first did this. They’d argued about where the scope of their shared life really began, and time’s never felt less real than it does now—but it must have been. Two years.

Jason tries not to lose himself entirely, because Marie needs him. He’s shaking, and he knows it comes across in his voice, but he aims for steadying lightness by saying, “You said you weren’t gonna let me do this anymore. I’m not very good.”

Marie smiles faintly. “If I could lift my arms...” Her eyes are closed.

Jason cuts as short as he can, closest to where it had been shaved in the hospital. His hand trembles so much he can barely close the scissors.

He sets them down. The sound of running water seems to get louder and louder in his ears, a remembered, crushing roar coming back to him, drowning everything out.

He cups Marie’s jaw, and her eyes open. "I have to tell you—"

Her voice is soft. "You did. I know."

"No, I have to—Marie, everyone thinks you're dead. There's articles, there's, there's recordings…I had no idea—”

Jason knows he’s rambling in a way he hasn’t done for years. Maybe since they met, since the first time he felt the urgent need to explain himself to her, to make Marie understand he was being as honest with her as he possibly could.

In the intervening months, he'd started to hold back; reluctant to share every detail of every dream, a guilty consciousness growing that he should shield Marie from whatever he could. But it didn't work like that, she reminded him. She wasn't doing this halfway.

It's a commitment that hasn't waned. Marie's eyes are wide with concern at his visible undoing—though tired as she must be, she manages to press the flat of her palm against his neck. Reassuring pressure as she whispers, "Ssh. Jason, we can talk about this later—"

Marie winces, just slightly, as she says it. She leans into Jason more, her forehead at his shoulder. His arms come up around her. He tries to calm himself with the sensation of her warm and alive against him, but it doesn’t stifle what’s pushing up his throat.

"I went to Martin."

That makes Marie lift her head, incredulous. "You did what?"

"I went to him in Paris. I told him that you got shot in front of me, and you were dead."

"You said we could never go there again.”

"I know. I know, but I needed to. There wasn’t anything left to protect. I tried to do what you would've wanted."

The world feels a little clearer with the confession relieved. Jason watches Marie's face, and her expression focuses him further—her gratitude apparent, but outweighed by her pain and regret.

In further apology, Jason leans their foreheads together. Marie closes her eyes again. She takes a shuddering breath. She tells him, her weight pressing into him more and more, anchoring him, "We still don't need to do this right now. Come on. I want to lie down in a real bed.”

-

When Jason opens the chest at the foot of the bed to get clean sheets, the ransacked inner compartment is clearly visible, and he has to reassure Marie he’s not burned any of the letters that were hidden inside. She nods. She looks exhausted. Jason doesn’t try and tell her where he put them, or that he didn’t read them, either—it can wait.

Jason always tried not to put too much thought into this cottage, to remember it could only ever be impermanent. He knew Marie loved it; her care exuded from everything she did to it. He valued witnessing her efforts to make it a real home, reassured that he could give her the chance—if always tempered with the knowledge it couldn’t last.

But he always appreciated the bed. Its size, the way the breeze rolled in from the window and swayed the canopy curtains gently, how tucked away it was, private: a space where he could isolate the world to her. Long nights and late mornings spent wrapping himself around her. Trading warm breaths as they moved together. How Marie layered it with soft quilts in winter and lounged invitingly in loose shirts on the hot summer nights, the patterns and fabrics blending into each other.

It didn’t always allow for peace. Sometimes, Jason knows that Marie laid there and felt he wasn’t there with her at all. He knew that she laid alert, another habit he had ingrained in her without meaning to. The dreams had plagued him increasingly and he did his best to hide it, but he knew it robbed her both of rest and of him.

Marie's awareness of Jason clearly hasn’t left her, even after weeks spent without him. After what must be almost an hour of listening to the steady rise and fall of her breaths, he hears her voice.

“You’re not sleeping.”

Marie speaks into the darkness where Jason's been holding her and trying not to think. It used to work. Countless times, she distracted him from everything else with a focus and tenderness she never lost. Not since that first night.

But there’s an urge Jason hasn’t let himself really acknowledge yet. It’s been building in him for hours—tempered at first by disbelief and an immense, engulfing gratitude, by the part of him that clicked into gear when it came to finding them refuge. Now, left to lie there and feel the warm weight of what he failed to protect curled against him, the thought tears at him until it’s impossible to ignore.

When he doesn’t respond right away, Marie lifts her head off of his chest to look at him. Her movements are slower than he’s used to; Jason instinctively tightens his grip on her at the physical evidence of lingering weakness.

He swallows. “You could leave.”

In the shadows, still half-asleep, Marie blinks at him. Shakes her head for a moment like she can't understand. Until her eyes widen in recognition and her mouth drops open slightly, at a loss.

“Oh my God, this again? Now?”

Jason carries on, heedless to any protest. He needs to get this out.

“Abbott told me I killed you. He said you were dead the moment I got into your car. Your brother said he always knew it would happen. I denied it, but—maybe I just wanted it to not be true. I wanted to have you. But I can’t ask for…"

He swallows again, throat dry. He licks his lips. He can't really make out Marie's expression, but he needs her to hear him, even if saying the words aloud means he looses what he's only just found.

He tries again. "You have this chance. They’re not looking for you alive anymore. It’s not a priority. I might still be, but not you. And I’ve already taken your life from you—twice. You have a choice.”

Marie doesn't say anything for a long moment. Jason's heart races as he looks up at her, trying to distinguish anything he can in her face. The moonlight is all he has to see her by. Just enough to see her mouth move as she finally responds, “Yes, I do.”

She says this so pointedly that Jason knows something he hasn’t dared to ask her yet—that she remembers it’s the last thing she ever told him. That Marie remembers dying, because of him.

“It’s different now,” Jason insists. “I don’t—there’s still a lot I don’t understand, or that’s still just bits and pieces. But I remember—more, now. It’s not like it was two months ago. I’m not as cut off from it. I have to tell you everything I remember, and you’d be right to walk away—”

Marie touches his lips. He stops. She speaks, low and insistent—a promise. “Tell me tomorrow. Okay?”

A stab of guilt. Marie keeps asking him, and Jason keeps making her listen. Already, he’s letting her down.

Muted, he nods. Marie lifts her hand. Replaces it with her mouth. Earlier, she'd fallen asleep almost as soon as she laid her head on his chest and Jason realises they haven’t—not at the hospital, not since that cold underwater grave, and it’s all he can do not to hurt her with how desperately he kisses back.

Marie pulls back just enough to speak. He feels every word against his lips. “Maybe it’ll be different now that you remember. Now, you can try to forget.”

In the warmth and the dark, with an impossibility held firmly in his arms, Jason can feel the past start to drop away, no longer an encircling inevitability he’d only ever fail to outrun. Nothing can detract from what he has again, the months and years behind it, the life he didn’t lose and won’t brush aside.

“We can make new memories,” Marie tells him, and he believes her.

-

When Jason wakes, he's alone.

He bolts upright, but something calms him immediately: the sight of a post-it note lying incongruously on the pillow next to him. A habit Marie only got into here. One of the trade-offs for the increased danger of such a long stay was constant reassurance as to her movements.

He finds her in the office, standing a few feet away from his desk, on the deck where the doors open widely onto the beach. She’s watching the waves. Her back is to him as he approaches, but he can see in her profile that she's holding a mug, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders.

It's such a familiar scene that it’s almost as though the past two months had never happened. Except for the quilt. Marie never liked the cold, but it was rare enough here that she could sometimes savour it. And even this early in the morning, it's late enough in the year to be warm; he thinks she needs it for something else.

Jason touches her shoulder gently through the thick fabric. Marie doesn't react beyond a small, sideways smile.

“I'm sorry,” she says, “I guess I'm bored of being asleep. You looked like you needed it, though.”

“You should eat.”

“In a minute.”

He tries to look at her legs, but the quilt drapes to the floor. “Are you standing okay?”

“I'm fine. They spent a lot of time helping me. They said I'll keep improving, just that I need to take it slow.” Marie pauses before adding quietly, “They were good people. I wish I didn't have to just run away like that.”

“Well, I gave one of them a lot of money, if that helps.”

Marie doesn't say anything, but she turns to face Jason fully. When she asks him her question, he can see she's been holding back, already fearful of the response. “Why were you there?”

“I was in the morgue.”

Marie’s pain at his admission is immediate and obvious. Just like all the times they sat in this room and she examined the worst of what Jason could tell her. Just like in all those other cities, just like at the very beginning, her heart visibly rends with sympathy he’d never expected.

“Would it have made you feel any better if you’d found me?”

“I don't know,” he answers honestly. “Maybe I just wanted it to be over. I wasn't thinking.”

Marie stares at him. She nods. Takes a deep breath, looking away from him again, back to the water. “I'm going to miss it here.”

“I know. I'm sorry. But we have to—”

“Jason, I know.” Her interruption is firm, and he stops.

Jason thinks maybe she always understood more than he gave her credit for.

No noise except from the waves. Marie sips the last of her tea, cradling the mug to her face. The sun is rising. The early dawn light makes her glow.

Jason cut her hair even shorter this time than he had in Paris. They haven’t re-dyed it yet, either—though after two months, Marie's roots are getting dark. He remembers making a litany of fake IDs, carefully finding what little existed of her digitally to work from. It was helpful that she was already in the habit of dyeing her hair in a multitude of colours before they met; Jason's not sure he's ever seen it in its natural state.

Maybe he will, this time.

“I wish I could have answered their questions,” she says suddenly. “At the hospital. I just kept telling them I didn't remember. The doctor…I think he figured it out, maybe.” Marie glances back at him. “I don't know how.”

“I told you, there were—hold on.“

When Jason came in yesterday, an unimaginable expanse of hours ago, he was carrying a newspaper. He goes and retrieves it from the desk, takes Marie’s empty mug in exchange so she can read what's splayed on the front cover.

He watches her face as she reads, trying and failing to make sense of what's in front of her.

On some level, Jason's past was never real to her. Not because she denied it outright but because she was so certain they could surpass it. When it came to the details of his history, the kind of people he worked for, the things he did for them—Marie accepted it in theory, shared the weight of his burden, but she always held some bone-deep level of disbelief, one that led her to tentatively suggest every nightmare was just and only that. It was with them in the car, when she tried to reason against the danger that Jason already knew immutably to be real, and it’s with them now, as she scans the article text with increasingly apparent incredulity.

“I don't understand—this is everything. You told them—you jumped fourteen floors?”

“Yeah.” Jason rubs at his forehead. He doesn’t yet look to meet the shock in Marie's expression, steeling himself to explain something she needs to hear before they can get distracted by the particulars.

“Look, there's people looking for me who will never give up. Not until they see me dead with their own eyes. But there's others—like the one who tried to…I mean, when you—”

He's talked about Marie dying before. He barely elaborated on it to Martin; explained only in short and brutal detail. It was always the only way he knew to speak on the inescapable reality of death. Fragmented and ephemeral in his dreams but stark and inevitable in the light of day. Something to look out for everywhere he went. Something that would always catch up to him, just like Abbott said.

But finding Marie alive has robbed him of the ability to compartmentalise. He never really got to mourn her, and now he can't. But her return to him still brings back much more feeling than it could ever cut off. Now, Jason finds he can’t bring himself to speak of her death at all.

She touches his arm. She knows what he means.

He looks up at her, and moves on. “They…came after us, here, because they meant to kill me. This man, Abbott, wanted—to save himself from exposure. He thought he could use my death to do it, cover up his own involvement. Even though I told him he should have left us alone, he couldn’t accept the risk. But that's over, now. Read that paper. I put out everything I could—I had help, too. I’m not the only one who wants them to face consequences for what they did. A lot of them are going to jail. Abbott killed himself to escape that, and maybe others will, but they—there’s no risk that killing me stops, anymore.”

Jason watches Marie’s face carefully as he speaks. He knows it’s a lot to take in: names she doesn’t recognise, specifics he hasn’t had time to explain. But he can see her narrow it down to the essential—the question of what it all means for them.

Slowly and deliberately, Marie asks him, “So we're okay?”

All the times Jason told her, over and over, that there was nothing for them to do but fear. The only thing he ever really promised her was the threat of death. But in the end, even the worst confirmation of his fears didn’t validate his approach. After all, Marie managed to survive not through any amount of careful planning and suspicion but through pure chance, sheer and unimaginable. As lucky as Jason had been when she first let him into her car.

He tries to take the chance she’s given him. He tries to change.

“I don't know what that would look like,” Jason confesses. “There’s always going to be danger. I just know that—it won't be the same. I promise. This time, it'll be different.”

Marie looks torn. She looks like she wants to believe him, but she’s afraid. Held back by things Jason never meant to force her to accept.

It only reaffirms the need to convince her, this time. The purpose calms Jason, gives him resolve. Stepping closer, he gently eases a hand under the quilt to curve it against the side of her neck. Marie's heartbeat picks up against his palm. “I mean it, Marie. I promise. I don't know what it will look like. But we'll figure it out.”

Marie looks back at him as unwaveringly as she ever did. There’s a dawning hopefulness in her eyes—but more than that, Jason sees certainty he spent two years failing to understand.

Eventually, she says only, “Okay.” Her face breaks into a smile. There’s still some hesitation—it’s not the way she beamed so unreservedly at him in Mykonos, when the future seemed far off and undefined, something they didn’t need to worry about just yet. But Jason thinks of this as a greater feat. That Marie could live the past two years and still choose not to walk away; that she still believes irrevocably in something better. A light worth striving for. Something good.

“Come on.”

Marie takes his hand, and she leads him back inside.