The Birth of a new moon

that was straightforward, and the attempt to reduce it to analysis and point out the logical progress of her thoughts only served to make the lack of logic more obvious and her own position more tenuous, even desperate. As she wrote, she was aware of how personal she was becoming, how she was revealing not her competence as a trained investigator, but her feelings—claustrophobia and grinding anxiety, the upwelling of fears and memories, the sensation of impotence. (What is the female equivalent of impotence, Glen? she found herself writing. Hysteria? Well, I am both impotent and hysterical.) What she wrote was like nothing she had ever given Glen before, presenting details of her self and her life that she had never given anyone, not since Aaron had died, but here she was, her hand shaping letters that described just what Abby's face had looked like in death and how that vision kept intruding itself on her current choices and decisions. Even while she wrote, she was appalled at the intimacy of the document, fully aware that Glen would have no choice but to set it before countless others, but unable to stop herself from writing. The sensation of open communication was a lifeline to sanity, the words a catharsis that reached down to her bones. She told herself that she would destroy it when she finished, that she could write a second, expurgated version for Glen, but she knew she would not.

Lights-out came and an officious passerby tapped at her door, so she turned out her lamp and opened the curtains to write by the light of the compound floodlights. She wrote until she had it all down, up to the point of what she planned to do next, and as she was thinking about that she fell asleep.

She woke some hours later, her diary jabbing her cheek and the floodlight shining in her eyes. Her bladder was also protesting at the number of cups of tea she had drunk, so she removed the chair from under the doorknob and went down the hall to use the toilet and brush her teeth. When she got back to her room, she saw the diary lying openly on the pillow, and she closed the door and cautiously tore out the incriminating pages. The only place she could think to hide them was inside the sole of her Chinese slippers; she folded the pages over and over and pushed the long rectangle in between the cloth lining and the sole. Not ideal, but as a temporary hiding place, as good as she could do.

She put her head back onto the pillow, and was asleep.

Ana's day began two hours later, long before the birds had begun their dawn chorus, when her bedroom door was flung open and a man's voice began talking at her. She went from deep sleep to heart-pounding panic in a split second, whirling around in the tangling covers and bruising her elbow on the wall before she was upright and blinking at the door. It was Jonas.

'What?' she croaked.

'What is wrong with you? I said I'm not going to need you during the day, I'm working on some calculations, but I may want you tonight. Be available. Listen for my call. You know how to get there?'

She sat up more fully, scratched her scalp to encourage brain activity, and said, her sarcasm half swallowed up by a yawn, 'I think I can find it again, Jonas.'

He stepped back and was gone. After a minute she climbed out of bed and closed the door. The sarcasm that she had let slip was not a good sign, but she was, after all, fast asleep, and it was annoying to be credited with barely enough brains to walk downstairs to the Bear's den.

Her eyes went to the diary on the bedside table. After a moment, she took it up and turned to a clean page.

Glen—I fully intend to watch my step, take care, and all the rest. For the first time in many long years I can honestly say that I do not want to die. Realistically, though, things happen. You and I both know that. We've known it since the day you planted your finger on the doorbell of my apartment fifteen years ago.

I should have died eighteen years ago with my husband and daughter. I did not. I have finally come to accept that, thanks in no small part to you, and to think that maybe the years between my should-have death and my actual one have been good for something. God's will is not a phrase I care to use, but there is a fate, Glen—a divinity, as Shakespeare calls it—and it does shape our ends.

My fate was to meet Jason and Dulcie. If it brings my end, if a thing happens to me in the next week or two, it will have been worth it. All I ask is that they be kept safe.

I ask it of God, and I ask it of you. I've never asked you for anything, Glen, not even an explanation. I am asking this. Keep those two children safe for me.

—Anne

She tore out the page and folded it up, and was beginning to slip it into the shoe, when she paused to run a hand over the rubbery skin of her face, then smoothed out the page and took up her pen again.

P.S. Sorry about the maudlin sentiments—I haven't slept much recently and my brain is a bit fried. If I can't e-mail this to you in the next two days, I'll find the village post office or a nice friendly helmeted constable riding his wide-tired bicycle down a country lane and send it to you that way. Not to carp, Glen, but you better hurry. There's not a lot of time here.

P.P.S. Oh, and Glen? I hope you're planning to invite me to your wedding. If you don't, I plan to turn up anyway and really embarrass you.

—A

She smiled as she folded the page into the slipper. As she set off in the direction of the early-morning coffeepot, she detoured to take her revenge on Jonas's followers by yanking the pull chain on the antique and incredibly noisy toilet.

She spent the morning happily and mindlessly scrubbing floors, and after lunch joined Jason and two other American students for a brief but productive meeting with Dov and one of the other teachers. Jason, blase as he had been, found it difficult to take his eyes off the lumpy sack she had brought into the room.

After the meeting they gathered up Dulcie from the kindergarten room (where she sat listening carefully to a wildly chattering friend) and Ana led them out through the kitchen and across the yard to a flat, paved area that was used to park the farm tractor during the rainy season. She had spent the hour before breakfast sweeping away the dirt and hanging up a circle she wove from a roll of baling wire. Jason stood with his hands on his hips, puzzling out the odd markings, and when he turned and Ana bounced the ball off the rough concrete and into his hands, a look of pure, uncontained pleasure lit up his face. He dribbled the ball a few times to get the feel of the surface, then circled around, took three fast steps, and shot it neatly through the lopsided hoop.

'I thought they didn't play basketball here,' he said.

'Does that look like a regulation hoop? They don't—well, not many of them. I brought the ball with me.'

That stopped him short. 'You brought the ball in your—oh. Duh. You let the air out first.'

'I thought I was going to have to blow it up with my mouth like a balloon. Sara found me an old pump in the tool shed.'

So she and Jason and little Dulcie played basketball, undisturbed and undistracted by the adults and children who came to investigate the odd noises. She blocked him, he dodged her, and Dulcie ran after them both, shrieking in joy. Twice Jason lifted his sister up so she could dunk the ball down through the makeshift and increasingly asymmetrical hoop. The third time Dulcie dunked it, the hoop came down. Dulcie felt terrible, but Jason only laughed.

Ana retrieved the mashed hoop. 'I think this design needs some work,' she said, putting it into the sack with the ball. 'But now, I want to take you two for a walk.'

She took a smaller sack out of the lumpy one, threaded the handles up over her shoulder, plunked obedient hats on all three heads, and led the two children down the road to the east of the house. The sparking air was rich with the fragrances of mint (from Dulcie, whose class had worked in the herb garden) and roses, lavender and cut grass, and the clean smell of sweat from the boy at her side.

The abbey was not quite as impressive when approached from the direction of cultivated land, but it was still a place of calm loveliness, even to a five-year-old child and a fourteen-year-old boy.

'It used to be a church,' she told them. 'Four hundred years ago it was part of a monastery; you can see the outline of the walls. That lumpy ground over there was probably the monastery itself, where the monks lived and worked.'

They walked up and down, investigating the vague shapes beneath the turf, and then went into the space between the abbey walls and up to where the altar stone peeped out of the grass. There she laid out her picnic of cheese sandwiches and juice and three large and somewhat travel-worn cellophane-wrapped chocolate chip cookies