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my hands over the flames.
    * * *
    I can’t sleep now, even as the windows blush with early light. I pace around the house, check the doors and windows, turn on the radio and turn it off again. When the sun rises over the trees, I venture cautiously outside. There is a depression in the grass where he stood. I turn in circles on the spot, trying to imagine what he saw and what he thought, what it means that he was here.
    Later in the morning, I find a cardboard box on my doorstep. It’s sealed with packing tape, but has no shipping label or address on top.
    I take it to the kitchen and set it on the counter. With a paring knife, I slit the tape—first at the sides, then down the center. Inside is another box of thinner, white cardboard. I lift this out and set in on the counter. One more piece of tape to slice, and there, nestled in a bed of tissue paper, is a third box.
    Jack’s box. The one I tried to steal.
    I run my hands over the fine-grained cherrywood and trace the inset panels of satiny bird’s-eye maple. The brass hinges are so cleverly concealed and aligned that the slightest touch is enough to open the lid. Inside, the box is lined with black felt and filled with his belongings—and on top, a note, written in narrow black script on a square of cream-colored paper:

    Alice ~
    I’ll show you mine...
    7:00 ~ Jack

    Below his name, he’s written his phone number.
    I set the note aside and peer into the box, lifting things out one by one and setting them on the counter. A set of spiky metal jacks with a few clinging fragments of blue and red paint; a business card, embossed with the name of an architectural firm in bold letters over the faint design of a blueprinted floor plan—Taylor & Fitch; a pair of heavy, unmistakably authentic handcuffs; a key on a plastic Motel 6 key ring; a piece of wax paper, folded into a square, and inside a perfect four-leaf clover; an old pair of eyeglasses with a crack in the lens; a black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired woman on the beach, winsome and laughing behind heavy sunglasses; a folded-up piece of paper with part of a handwritten Neruda poem; a man’s wedding band, which I slip over my thumb; and on the bottom, facedown, a last photograph. I pick it up and turn it over. A square of yellow window light on a dark wall, softened by a sheer, wavy curtain—and behind that, a wraithlike figure peering out from the space between the curtain panels. I recognize the tattoo on the girl’s arm before I know her face.
    It’s me. Looking right into the camera without seeing it, as if at something very far away. He must have taken the picture from the forest behind my house. He must have been there, watching, for a long time. In fact, seeing the top I’m wearing in the photograph, he must have been there more than once. I haven’t worn that shirt in three days.
    Awareness swells inside me. My skin is shivery-thin, barely able to contain me.
    This is a language I understand. The language of secrets.
    I’ll show you mine.
    My gaze trails away, over the countertop and past the entryway corner, where I see my reflection in the hall mirror. The photo is pressed to my lips, and the expression in my eyes, caught in a wedge of late-morning sunlight, seems suddenly, vibrantly alive.
    I smile, and my reflection smiles back.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “How did you find this place?” I ask.
    It’s 8:30 p.m., and we’re seated at a tiny table inside an
equally minute Thai restaurant in Seattle, across the Sound from Vashon Island.
The restaurant’s narrow facade is deceiving. Inside, the ceiling opens to a
second-floor dining room with space for only six tables. We have a bird’s-eye
view of the kitchen below, where a cloud of steam rises from an ancient hammered
pot as the cook ladles up two bowls of soup.
    “I came here with a friend,” Jack says. “And left with the
waitress.”
    A young woman appears at the top of the steps and deposits our
dinner on the battered wooden table. When