Chapter 33: In the Open

At ten to ten, Chan's phone lit up again on my porch rail.

The yard had been emptying slowly.

The Legion ladies had gone home with their casseroles, and the constable's pickup had taken the man away to the cells.

Rory sat on my step with a thermos and his gaff, refusing to leave.

Odette had arrived in her car with a box of cinnamon buns.

She had taken Hyunjin by the shoulders and walked him into my kitchen to eat something.

Chan stood alone at the bottom of the steps, looking at the screen.

I came down and stood beside him.

"Charter," he said. "Ten minutes."

"Halifax is three hours away."

"I know. He knows too. It's a message to see what I do."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet."

"Yes, you do," I said.

He turned his head, and I held up my hands.

"I won't touch it. I won't tell you.

"I said I'd drive you to the airport, and I will. If you can't stay, you can't, and I won't lie on the porch."

He studied my face.

"You'd really drive me."

"I'd carry your bag. And I'd come home and cry for a week, with Hyunjin holding the tissues.

"In the spring I'd be fine. That's the truth. I'd survive it."

His throat worked.

"That's what I can't stand," he said. "That you'd survive it. That you'd make me a clean ending."

"I can't make you stay."

"I know."

"But I won't be a woman who needs saving, either. Not from the press, not from you.

"You've been trying to keep me safe by keeping me outside, and I've been outside my whole life."

He looked at the lane, where the last two fans stood with their phones lowered, listening.

He looked at Rory's pickup, the flag on the post office, and the red cap of the tower.

Then he put his thumb on the screen and called Min Gitae back.

He put it on speaker, and held it in front of him in the open air.

It rang twice.

"Chan-ah," Min said, in Korean. "I've been waiting."

"Say it in English, Manager Min. There's a lady here who'd like to follow."

A pause.

"As you wish. Are you at the airport?"

"I'm standing in Mara Larkin's front yard. The man who followed Hyunjin for two years was arrested in her kitchen an hour ago."

"I heard," Min said. "I'm sorry. You see how right I was about security."

"You've had four hundred and six photographs of her house through a window. You hired the man who took them."

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