Snowfall at Willow Lake

Now she rubbed the baby’s back, standing up and swaying back and forth on the balcony. “We don’t need a prince, do we?” she whispered in his ear. “We just need to fantasize about something different. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. I mean, I know you’re really little, but I wonder if you’d mind staying with a babysitter for a few hours a week while I take a photography course at the college.”

He rewarded her with a gentle belch.

Daisy smiled. “That’s right, I got in. My portfolio was approved for the class, and it all starts in a few weeks. I’m going to feel totally guilty about leaving you, though. Mom left Max and me a lot when we were little. She had to, because of her work. I wonder if she felt like this, too. Just totally guilty—”

“Hey, Daisy!” Standing two stories below, Sonnet Romano waved at her. “Come on down. They’re about to cut the cake.”

“Don’t let them start without me,” Daisy called.

“You want some help?”

“That’s okay. We’ll be right there.”

Nina’s daughter Sonnet was the first friend Daisy had made in Avalon, New York, where they’d moved after Daisy’s parents divorced. She was the first person Daisy had told, after her dad, about being pregnant. Now Sonnet and Daisy were stepsisters. She hoped that didn’t mean the end of a beautiful friendship.

“You hear that?” Daisy said to Charlie as she put her camera into the ever-present diaper bag. “Cake! I love cake.” One of the best things about breastfeeding was that you could eat anything you wanted—cake, peanut butter, cookie dough, you name it—and you didn’t gain weight, because it took a lot of calories to be a milk factory.

She buckled the baby into his carrier and headed out the door. The hotel had open-air hallways and stairwells, and a warm breeze flowed through, carrying the scent of exotic flowers. Here in the tropics, winter seemed a million miles away.

At the bottom of the stairs, she headed toward the reception, but stopped when she saw Max running toward her.

She took one look at her brother’s face and knew something was wrong. Well, whatever it was, they weren’t going to bug Dad about it. Not today, of all days.

Part Four

Three weeks later

Decision

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

—Andrew Carnegie, founding contributor of the Peace Palace

Seven

The Hague, Holland

Three weeks later

While waiting for Tariq in the courtyard of the Peace Palace, Sophie turned in a slow circle, waiting for the flashbacks to hit like a bolt from the sky. She’d been told by her post-trauma treatment team to expect unsettling reminders of the ordeal she’d suffered here. But nothing happened, not even when she thought about André staggering toward her, bleeding into the snow. She felt a wave of grief, but no panic, no insanity. The sky remained its usual brooding gray. The neo-Gothic walls of the palace, stained by age and pollution, looked the same as they always had, coldly beautiful and impenetrable.

This was not the first time she’d come here in the past few weeks. She’d been brought here several times, as her doctors wanted to be sure the location did not trigger any sort of trauma-induced reaction. On the contrary, she felt nothing but the usual bone-deep dampness of a typical winter day.

The screen of her PDA displayed a text message from Max sent the day before. Dad taking us skiing at Saddle Mt 2day. Wish U were here xoxo. She checked her watch, which was always set at her children’s time zone, and deemed it too early to phone the States. There would be time to call after her meeting today to tell them her plans.

A moment later, Tariq joined her, his Burberry greatcoat swirling fashionably in the wind. Like Sophie, he was shadowed by security agents, whose constant presence was a given these days.

“You look remarkably calm,” said Tariq.

They set off together to a meeting at the supreme chamber. Sophie eyed him with a slight frown. “Why do you say ‘remarkably calm’? Why not just calm?”

“No one would blame you for not wanting to set foot in this place. After what happened to you—”

“I swear, if I hear that phrase one more time … And what about you? It happened to you, too.”

He waved away her comment. “I’ve survived worse than a bloodied nose. Besides, being unconscious is my preferred way of enduring an attack.” He paused in the colonnaded hallway and touched her arm. “I wish you’d been spared as I was.”

Three weeks had passed since the incident. That was how the events on the night of Epiphany had come to be known—the incident. Or, The Incident. The Epiphany Incident, referred to in somber tones by foreign correspondents. The London Times had called it the Twelfth Night Massacre. But there was no term that could encompass the terror and powerlessness of that night until it became a code word—The Incident.

She had walked away from death that night, soaked to the skin but feeling nothing. Hypothermia created such symptoms, the doctors later told her. The body went numb to protect itself from damage. So, in a way, had her mind. Her memory of the ordeal was fragmented. Sometimes, in her nightmares, she relived the ordeal in terrifying bursts. There was the weightlessness of her free fall as the van hurtled through the night. The impact when it hit the water thundered up through the vehicle, jarring her teeth so that she bit her tongue, snapping her head back. The air was filled with screams and howls that sounded almost animallike. Water flooded the van from front to back, and she felt herself swept backward; her captors hadn’t bothered to fasten her seat belt.

The investigative team speculated that she’d exited via a broken window, as evidenced by the pattern of scratches on her arms and legs. She’d survived thanks to a combination of luck and skill at swimming. She had a vague recollection of swimming—icy water, aiming at a dull flicker of light shimmering on the surface above her, battling her way free of the vortex created by the sinking van. Oil-tainted seawater rushed into her nose and mouth, causing her to choke while she clung to an iron loop set into the cut-stone side of the canal.

Another gap of memory. Somehow, she hoisted herself out amid wailing sirens and the pulsating roar of a helicopter’s rotor blades beating the air and churning up the water. Emergency vehicles swarmed the bridge, but no one seemed to notice her. It was as though she were invisible. Maybe she was. She remembered thinking maybe this was death, and no one could see her as she wandered among squad cars and emergency vehicles. One great mercy of working for such a powerful organization was the strict control of information. Only a few people knew Sophie had been taken; fewer still were aware of her mode of escape. And no one knew she had caused the van to go off the bridge. No one, except the terrorists who had been pulled alive from the Voorhaven. And they weren’t talking.

To avoid retaliation, her name was kept out of accounts released to the public.

“I was spared,” she told Tariq, her tone edged by an unreasoning anger. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Sorry,” Tariq said. “Honestly, Petal, I want to know you’re all right.”

Sophie’s decisive action in the van had effectively ended The Incident. Three of her captors had drowned. Three others, like Sophie, had survived—just barely—and were recovering under heavy guard in the hospital.

People looked at her and marveled that she’d escaped “unscathed.” She bore no outward sign of her ordeal.

She’d suffered only minor scratches, contusions and a touch of hypothermia. The treatment team at Bronovo Hospital had warned her that she was at risk for posttraumatic stress disorder, though tests revealed that her psyche appeared to have survived, as well. Certainly she didn’t consider herself a casualty of the event. Casualties were André, her driver. And the security agents who had been murdered. And, it had to be said, the men in the van. Fatou had lost the baby and now faced a third surgery, and Brooks Fordham was still recovering from a coma. Sophie had walked away, dripping wet, a survivor. And, she was soon to discover, a stranger to herself. She was willing to let everyone believe nothing about her had changed. She certainly was not comfortable allowing people to look into her heart and mind. Still, it left her feeling adrift. Misunderstood.

Immediately following the incident, she had called her children in St. Croix and her parents in Seattle, on the off chance that the news would somehow creep into the American or Canadian media. No danger of that, as it turned out. She’d told her family simply that there had been a “security situation” at the Peace Palace but she was fine and in no danger. The incident was no big secret, but she didn’t want to worry her family. She hadn’t cried on the phone. She’d felt displaced from herself, as though she were watching her own actions.

As she told the two psychiatrists who had treated her, “If I let this be a big deal, it won’t leave room for the things that are important.” Through hours and hours of intensive therapy, she had come to realize exactly what those things were.

She had not spoken of what had happened during the ordeal, not even to the medical and psychological team that had cared for her during the aftermath. Dr. Maarten had tried to persuade her that exploring every moment in exhaustive detail was the key to defeating the demons.

“You don’t understand,” she had told him. “There are no demons. They went away the moment I survived.”

“Are you sure?” He clearly thought she was either lying or fooling herself.

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve studied every item on your post-trauma assessment lists. I’m not suffering from any such symptoms, and I don’t plan to in the future.”

Now she glanced over at Tariq. He knew as well as she did what was going to happen here today. They had offered her an appointment most jurists only dreamed about and today she was expected to give her answer.

She was used to the bodyguards by now. In a very short time, she’d become accustomed to the safety precautions. It all felt very surreal. Did she want this to be her normal life, to be crushed by scrutiny, to walk among armed strangers who were utterly focused on her safety?

“Off we go, then,” Tariq muttered.

“Off to see the wizard,” she said.

The double doors of the lead justice’s office opened, and she and Tariq went inside. There was a heartbeat of panic—not because of The Incident but because of something much deeper-reaching than that. Willem De Groot, Esquire, sat at a carved Gothic desk in front of an array of stained-glass windows. Illuminated from behind by jewel-toned light, he looked imposing, otherworldly and intimidating. The wizard.