The man’s name was Jonathan, Sara’s mother told her. He was thirty-one years old, a veteran (of what war, Sara didn’t know) who walked with a limp and an ash-white cane. Hair honey-blond, eyes dark as polished jet, a mouth that smiled and frowned with equal ease. Jaime disliked him on impulse — Sara, the opposite entirely.
She first saw him standing with her father on the docks, shoulders sloped from his poorly-healed wound, the molten sun spilling a gleam onto the gold of his hair. There was a strangeness to his expression, a particular sort of cunning — no one would have ever called him beautiful. He was too curious, insatiable that way, and Sara knew by then that certain beauty was formed only by restraint: the poise of her mother as she stood cast in sleepy afternoon light, her father with his longest knife in one hand and the tormented carcass of an animal in the other. Throats slit neatly, effortless as sin, long days followed by longer nights and seasons abruptly coming to their inevitable ends. This was what she knew: the lush wild of the swampland and her parents’ temperate kindnesses, not this pale-haired stranger with eyes blacker and wilder than an animal’s. He fascinated her.
“You remind me of someone,” she told him when she first met him, almost shy.
“I hope that’s not a bad thing.”
“No,” Sara said. “She was my friend.”
Why he was allowed into their home went unspoken, as did much else. The first night was silent on the river save for the peal of her mother’s laughter, the unexpected tenor of the stranger’s voice threaded somewhere far below. Sara’s father drank nothing but water, observed Jonathan from underneath the dark cast of his lashes, this man merely ten years younger but decades behind.
“Who is he?” Her brother’s voice was clipped, almost impatient.
“He was a soldier.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.” He was seventeen and drinking dry gin, the whites of his eyes brilliant in the lamplight. Sara sat beside him with her chin on knees. There was a wine glass of bottom-shelf vodka in her right hand and the world was spinning, incandescent, alive. When Jonathan turned to look at them both she went still, back straightening underneath the cutting gaze of authority, and she thought she — almost — could see him at the edge of a smile.
“Jaime, and Sara,” he said. His voice was inexpressibly pleasant, innocuous in its way, and Sara wondered what on earth he had in common with her hard-edged mother and father. Her bandaged wrist burned.
“It’s good to meet you,” he said. Jaime said nothing, but Sara was more receptive.
“You too,” she said. His eyes grazed over them both, and then he turned away.