“And you?” the man says. “What takes you to Bali?”

The plane breaks through the cloud and there it is—an island full of dense jungles, terraced rice paddies, and glorious beaches. Jamie flinches as if someone’s laid a fist into her heart.

“Vacation?” her seatmate asks when she doesn’t answer.

“Yes,” she lies. “Vacation.”

He’s already told her about his silent meditation retreat, how he can’t wait, how he needs to unwind, and she thinks: Start now. She curses herself for talking to him in the first place. It was the second scotch that loosened her tongue and made her break her rule: no chats on airplanes. You can’t escape.

“All by yourself?” he asks.

Jamie turns toward him. “There’s an event,” she says. “I was invited to attend.” She absentmindedly runs her finger against the long, thin scar at the side of her face and then buries her hand in her lap.

“A wedding?” he asks eagerly. He’s already told her about his wonderful Australian fiancée who will meet him at the retreat in Ubud.

“No,” Jamie says. Her mind’s a muddle of thoughts now. There’s no reason to tell him anything. And yet she’s been telling the world: I’m going back to Bali. She’s loved watching the astonished faces of her friends. How brave, they’ve said. How bold.

The plane shudders as it passes through a cloud, and Jamie grips the arms of her seat.

“What are you drawing?” her seatmate asks. “You’re good.”

Jamie looks at the pad in her lap. She’s sketched the island from an aerial view. She uses a light hand and few strokes—she’s self-taught, and it shows. Sometimes she gets it right and sometimes—like this time—the lines don’t add up.

“Doodles,” she says, covering the paper with her hand. The plane tilts to reveal the southern coast of Bali. “That’s Kuta Beach.”

The white-sand beach stretches for miles. The center of the island is all mountain and jungle. The color is astonishing—iridescent lizard green. Then it’s gone and they’re immersed in a thick cloud.

“You’ve been here before?” he asks.

“A year ago,” she says. Her palms are slick with sweat.

“When my fiancée told me to meet her here, I said, No way, José. Hundreds of people were killed in the terrorist attack last year, right? Bombs at nightclubs? But she keeps promising me it’s paradise.”

How the hell will this guy survive a silent meditation retreat, Jamie thinks.

And like a man who doesn’t know what to do with a momentary silence, he plunges on. “Why would terrorists target Bali? I get the World Trade Center—it was the core of the economic world. But kids dancing at a club on some remote Indonesian island?”

The plane bumps along the runway. Jamie releases her breath.

“You don’t have to go,” Larson, her boss and her best friend, had told her yesterday when he drove her to the airport from Berkeley. “You’ve been through enough.”

“I have to do this,” Jamie told him.

“Me, I avoid pain.”

She watched a sly smile appear on his craggy fifty-seven-year-old face. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer three months before. His life was pain.

“You’ll be okay without me?” Jamie asked.

“Who needs you? I’ve got two dates this weekend.”

Jamie put her hand on his bald head. She calls it her Wishing Dome. She’d rub it and make three wishes. Live longer. Live better. Live.

“Call me while I’m away and charge it to the business,” Jamie had said. “Don’t tell the boss.”

“The boss never misses a thing,” Larson told her. “I know what you’re up to in Bali. And it’s not all about the ceremony.”

“It’s all about the ceremony,” she insisted.

“You’re going to try to find that guy,” Larson said. “Gabe.”

“Wrong,” Jamie told him. But her voice wobbled and she turned away from him.

Now loud static fills the air, and the pilot says something inaudible over the intercom. The man next to her pats her hand. She swings her head back toward him.

“You take care now,” he says. He is already standing and gathering his things. The passengers fill the aisles. When did the plane come to a stop?

Jamie nods. She doesn’t move. The man disappears down the aisle.

She looks at the drawing in her lap. A couple of the lines—palm trees, though she can’t remember if there even are palm trees in Bali—look like monsters standing guard over the island. I’m back, she tells them. Don’t mess with me.

Finally she pushes herself up and out of her seat. She’s the only passenger left on the plane. She reaches for her bag in the overhead bin and then moves down the aisle, rolling the suitcase behind her. A flight attendant, her vest already unbuttoned, mutters, “Sayonara my ass,” to herself. When she hears Jamie’s bag knock against the leg of a seat, she looks back.

“Oh, sorry,” the young woman says. “I thought everyone was gone.”

“I’d fallen asleep,” Jamie lies.

The flight attendant steps aside and finds her cheery smile. “Your first time in Bali?” she says sweetly.

Jamie hesitates, then nods.

“Spiritual journey?” the woman asks.

“God, no.”

The woman laughs. “Good,” she says. “So you won’t be disappointed. I can’t tell you how many of them get on the return flight and they’re surprised that they’ve still got all the same miserable problems they came with. I don’t know what they’re looking for.”

“The sun,” Jamie says. “That’s all I’m looking for.”

“That you’ll find,” the woman assures her. “Happy tanning.”

Jamie steps through the door of the plane and pauses before heading down the metal staircase to the tarmac. The heat wraps around her and stops her breath. She’s blinded by the sun, and she remembers the moment after the club was washed in a hot white blankness as if it had been erased—sound, too, had stopped—and then it all came screaming in—color, noise, pain.

“Can I help you?” the flight attendant asks Jamie.

“No,” Jamie says, and she takes a step forward, into Bali.

When the taxi jolts to a stop, Jamie’s eyes fly open and for a startled second she catches a glimpse of Gabe in her dream—no, it’s something more tactile than visual. His fingers drawing circles on her hip. The smell of the sea in his hair. She clears her mind with a shake.

“This is the street,” the taxi driver says, patiently waiting for her.

Jamie had been wide awake at the start of the hour-long taxi ride to Ubud. She watched the hordes of motorbikes fill the streets, rolling down the windows to let in thick tropical air. And then sleep kicked in. Hours on international flights and she couldn’t doze for a minute. Ten minutes in a beaten-up jalopy without air-conditioning and she was comatose.

“Lady,” the taxi driver says. He is young and smells of ginger. On the dashboard are prayer offerings, probably to the gods of potholed roads with too many motorbikes.

“Thank you,” Jamie says, paying the man and hauling her suitcase out of the car.

She stands on the sidewalk and looks around. She hadn’t visited Ubud a year ago. She’d stayed in Seminyak for the first few days. And then she spent three days in a beach cottage somewhere until she could flee the country.

But Ubud is the home of Nyoman, her host for this trip down memory lane. The foundation that organized the one-year-memorial event sent her a packet with his name, his address, and an itinerary of events leading up to the ceremony on Sunday. She’d also received a plane ticket, a gift from the government of Bali. She’d been promised a new Bali.

Jamie looks around. People swarm the streets, and she feels the immediate exhilaration that always marks her first day in a new country. But it’s mixed with something else, something that chills her skin, despite the damp heat. I can do this, she tells herself, in the same way she has argued with her mother for weeks. I have to do this.

She reads the name of the inn on the piece of paper in her hand: The Paradise Guest House. She walks by a series of modest cottages, some of them with stone gates and elaborate carved entrances, none of them with names.

She feels someone’s eyes on her and glances across the street. A young boy sits on the dusty curb with a dog. The boy is mangy; the dog is mangier. The boy boldly keeps his eyes on her, and, after a moment, his lips curl into a grin.

Jamie offers him a weak smile in return but thinks: Leave me alone.

The boy stands, and within a second the dog stands, too. The boy is probably twelve, Jamie guesses, and wily. He looks smart and vigilant, and she suspects that he’s a street kid. Or maybe all kids in Bali look like this—she has no idea. She doesn’t know this country. She doesn’t want to know this country.

But isn’t that why she’s here?

“I help you!” he calls from across the street.

“No, thank you!” Jamie calls back. She hurries down the road, pulling her small suitcase behind her.

But in a quick moment, he’s beside her, offering to take the suitcase, his hand on hers. She pulls away.

“I’m fine,” Jamie insists.

“You want nice hotel?” he says.

Do kids speak English here? Is it possible that last time, in one whole week, she never saw a kid in Bali? She saw the inside of her hotel room, beachside bars, a mountain trail. She saw Gabe, standing in a garden, his feet lost in a sea of orchids and gardenias.

“I don’t need help,” Jamie tells him, her voice a little sharp.

“Everyone need help,” the boy says, smiling. In fact, he has not stopped smiling. He is tall and he smells like earth and rain. His dog walks at his side like a shadow. It’s a skinny pup, some handsome mix of black Lab and border collie.

Jamie sees a sign outside a gate: THE PARADISE GUEST HOUSE. The sign is painted gold with black letters. She turns abruptly down the path, hoping to lose the boy. But he’s quick and again reaches for the suitcase. He must be looking for a tip.

“I’ve got it,” she says testily. “Goodbye.”

“You are tired,” the boy says. “Tomorrow you will be nicer.”

She nods, unsure how to answer him. He opens the gate for her and lets her pass through.

“I see you tomorrow, miss,” he says.

As he closes the gate, she takes a deep breath. Jasmine. The gate shuts out the noise from the street, the boy and his dog, the hot sun, the dust. Her eyes adjust to the cool darkness, and a tropical garden emerges, thick with banana trees, ferns, and hibiscus. She follows a path through the dense foliage to a small stone cottage with a carved wooden door, where she lifts a knocker in the shape of a monkey and lets it fall. A hollow booming sound interrupts the silence. She waits. After a moment she knocks again, louder this time.

Finally, in slow motion, the door creaks open. A man stands there, his hair tousled, his clothes rumpled. Did she wake him? He blinks at her and runs his hand over the front of his shirt.

“Can I help you?” he asks. His accent is better than the boy’s. He adjusts his crooked glasses and peers at her.

“I’m looking for Nyoman.”

“You have found him.”

“I’m Jamie Hyde.”

He stares at her.

“I received a letter from the organization that—” Jamie pulls open her small backpack and rummages in it to find the letter.

“Yes,” he says even before she finds it. A smile breaks through the creases of his face. “Welcome.”

“Were you expecting me?”

The man is silent for a moment. His hand goes to his head and he rubs it vigorously. When he’s done, his hair swirls on his head, making him look a little crazy.

I should leave, Jamie thinks. But, oddly, she takes a step closer to him.

“Tomorrow you are coming,” he finally says.

“I’m sorry. I thought it was—”

“You are welcome in my house. I am often confused.” His smile transforms his face. He’s probably around forty, Jamie guesses, and though he’s badly in need of some grooming, he’s a handsome man.

“I can find someplace else to stay tonight.” Jamie unconsciously touches the scar on her face, and then she tucks her hand in her pocket.

Nyoman reaches for her suitcase. “Follow me.”

He walks past her and out the door. But instead of passing through the gate and delivering her back onto the unfamiliar streets of Ubud, he walks around the house and toward a series of small cottages behind his own. Two young boys stand in front of one of the cottages, both with toy trucks in their hands. They stare at Jamie openmouthed and then turn and run, screeching as they disappear into the trees.

“Nephews,” Nyoman says. “One is loud and the other is louder.”

He is still walking, past one cottage and then another. A very old woman, her skin brown and wizened, sits on the ground in front of one door. She smiles a toothless grin at Jamie.

“Grandmother,” Nyoman tells Jamie. He says some quick words in Balinese to the old woman, and she giggles like a young girl.

At the fourth cottage he stops. Wisteria spills over the front of the small house, its pale violet blossoms filling the air with a pungent scent. The ground in front of the wooden door is covered with petals from the flowers, a blanket of color as a welcome mat.

“Your home,” he says.

Jamie feels something unwind inside her, something that had been knotted tight since she agreed to this trip. “Thank you,” she tells him.

“Now you rest. The flights are very long. I come to get you when it is time for your dinner.”

He pushes open the door and light pours into the single room. Jamie can see a four-poster bed with mosquito netting draped over the top. A wooden bureau with a mirror above it sits next to the wall. The room is simple and clean.

She takes a step inside. When she turns around, Nyoman is gone.

Standing in the doorway, she gazes out at the garden. There are lights in every cottage. His family, she assumes. She smells incense and she hears a rooster crowing. It is as if she stepped behind the wall of Ubud and found a different country.

My home, she thinks. Her real home in Berkeley is a room in a ramshackle Victorian house that she shares with three other adventure guides, all of them usually somewhere else in the world. And her mother had just moved out of the Palo Alto home Jamie grew up in. “I don’t want all those memories of life with your father,” Rose said when Jamie begged her to keep the house.

“I was there, too,” Jamie said, like a pouting child. She’s thirty-two; it shouldn’t matter where her mother lives. Maybe it’s her homelessness that makes her pine for that childhood bedroom. Or maybe it’s a yearning for all those dreams only a kid can have—parents who stay together for a lifetime, boyfriends who don’t die, nightclubs that don’t explode.

She hears the sound of someone singing. It’s a woman’s voice, high and sweet. The words must be Balinese or Indonesian—Jamie can’t tell the difference between the two languages. But she hears something so haunting in the song that she feels herself back away from the door. The woman’s heart is broken, she thinks.

She closes the door and the sound stops.

“I made it,” she says, and her mother sighs dramatically. “I’m fine, Mom.”

“I know you are.”

“I’m in a mountain town. I haven’t seen anything yet. I slept through the taxi ride.”

“And the place you’re staying?”

“It’s a family compound. I’ve got my own little cottage. Very sweet.”

“Is it safe?”

“As long as the chickens don’t take up guns.”

“Jamie.”

“Bad joke.”

“What happens next?”

“I sleep.”

“When is the ceremony? Do you have to go there?”

There is the bomb site. Jamie’s mother speaks in euphemisms. Since Bali means since the bombing. Did you sleep okay? means did you escape the nightmares that chase you.

“Not till Sunday. And, no, I don’t have to go to the bomb site.”

“Good. Lou thinks that would be good for you, but I don’t think it’s something you should have to go through.”

Lou is Mom’s soon-to-be-husband, a psychologist and apparently an authority on Jamie, though he barely knows her. Jamie ignores most of her mother’s offerings of wisdom from Lou. She’s not thrilled about the marriage—Lou is twelve years older than her mom and seems like an ancient ruin to Jamie, parts of him chipping and peeling away day by day. Everyone else’s mom turned cougar and caught a hot young thing. Couldn’t Rose ever follow a trend?

When Jamie asked her why they were getting married, Rose said, “He’s very good to me.” Which means: Your father wasn’t good to me. Which means: He’ll never cheat on me. I’ll never risk getting hurt like that again, even if it means I marry a relic.

“Will you promise me you’ll be safe?” Rose says.

“I’ll be fine.”

“That’s always been your gift and your curse.”

“What’s that?” Jamie asks, suddenly impatient.

“You’re invincible,” Rose announces. Jamie has heard it all before. She knows what comes next. “No one’s invincible.”

“Good night, Mom.”

“I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Jamie hangs up the phone, bombarded by the complicated swirl of emotions that she feels every time she talks to her mother. She climbs onto her bed in the cottage, tucks in the mosquito netting, and leans back against the wooden headboard. If she puts her head down, she’ll be sleeping in seconds. Her arm hurts, a deep ache at the elbow that was broken. The doctors have told her that it healed perfectly. The pain comes when she’s tired.

She reaches for her sketch pad at the side of her bed, then turns the page and looks out the window. A wall of wisteria drapes over the cottage next door. She tries to sketch it with quick strokes, the flowers a rush of smudged pencil—and when she stops she takes a look at what she’s done. Not bad. She’s captured something primordial in the drawing—the flowers consume the cottage.

For Larson, she writes at the top of the page. She gives the drawing a title: Nature Wins.

She lifts her cellphone and clicks on his name.

“Out climbing mountains,” his voice message tells her. “Leave a message.”

She smiles. He recorded that voice message the day he started chemo. Larson’s the one who sent her to Bali in the first place, to scout out a new tour. “You didn’t tell me to scout out the damn nightclub,” Jamie told him when he blamed himself for her trauma.

Now she leaves him a message. “I made it to Bali safe and sound. Why did I think this was such a hot idea? Listen, call me.”

Larson won’t tell anyone else he has pancreatic cancer and that he probably has about a year to live. His brother on the East Coast knows, but the guy is good for nothing but a weepy phone call every few days. Jamie has been Larson’s best friend ever since he hired her ten years ago. She loves him dearly, but she’s worried about what it means to be his only friend.

Jamie scooches down in bed and stares up at the ceiling. A gecko makes his way across the mosquito netting.

“Well, hello there,” Jamie says to him.

He stops as if he hears her.

“Don’t let me interrupt your travels,” she tells him.

The gecko scurries on.

She picks up her cellphone one more time. She dials the number she has for Gabe in Bali, a number she has never called. After one ring the connection is lost and a recording in Indonesian follows.

She drops the phone beside her on the bed and turns on her side. She cradles her arm, pressing into her elbow to stop the pain. And then she sleeps.

Jamie’s the only one at the table in the middle of the garden. It’s a small wrought-iron table with a tiled mosaic top, large enough for a couple of people. She expected dinner with the family, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. Nearby, a stone elephant spills water from its trunk into a basin. Lotus lilies float at its feet.

A teenage girl walks up to Jamie, carrying a plate of food. She wears a black miniskirt and a torn T-shirt with the words CAN’T GET NO LOVE on it. She’s got long shaggy hair, bleached blond, and thick black eyeliner; she wouldn’t look out of place in San Francisco. Jamie’s pretty sure this isn’t the Balinese way.

The girl puts a plate of rice and vegetables on the table and turns to leave.

“Thanks,” Jamie says. “Are you related to Nyoman?”

“Niece,” the girl says. She stands for a moment, looking wary.

“I’m Jamie.”

“Dewi.”

“Pretty name.”

“Where you from?”

“The United States.”

The girl’s eyes open wide. Her disgust and boredom evaporate. “I love America music!” she says with girlish enthusiasm.

“Yeah, what kind?”

“Heavy metal. America very cool.”

“How old are you?”

The question seems to upset the girl. She says, “Sixteen,” under her breath and then marches off toward the kitchen.

Nyoman walks toward Jamie from his cottage. He’s combed his hair and changed his clothes, but his glasses still sit awry on his nose.

“My niece is rebellious girl,” Nyoman mutters.

“I like her.”

“In Bali, when a baby is born,” he says, “the umbilical cord is buried in the ground in the courtyard of the family compound. As the child grows up, she might wander far from home. But in the end the umbilical cord draws her home. Dewi might wander, but she will come home.”

Jamie feels a yearning for such a place.

“You like food?” he asks, smiling.

“I was hoping I could eat with the family,” she says.

Nyoman laughs heartily, as if she has told a joke. “Bali family does not have dinner like on American television. We take food and eat by ourselves. No big deal like in your country.”

“Are there other guest rooms here?”

“Just one. We rent out to tourist. Mostly empty now.”

“Does Dewi live here?”

“Dewi is the daughter of my sister. She lives in the compound of her father, not far from here. In this compound lives my grandmother, my mother and father, my brother and his wife, and my nephews.”

“And this is how Balinese families live? All together?”

“You do not live with your family?” Nyoman asks.

Jamie shakes her head. “I share a house with a bunch of friends. My mother lives about an hour away from me.”

“All alone?”

“For the past eighteen years,” Jamie says. “But now she’s got a boyfriend. They’ll get married soon.”

“You have no father?” Nyoman asks. He looks bewildered.

“I’ve got one, all right. He ditched my mom and me and moved across the country with a pretty young thing. Now he’s got a brand-spanking-new family, all little kids running around the farm.” Her dad’s place in Connecticut is more country manor than farm, and the little kids are now teenagers. But Jamie has been telling her father’s story this way for so long that she hasn’t learned how to tell the new version.

Hard to put all those people in a family compound, she thinks.

“You don’t have to eat it,” Dewi says. She’s back at the table, and Jamie picks up her fork.

“I like it,” Jamie tells her.

“Miss Jamie,” Nyoman says, his voice loud.

She looks up at him. He squints at her as if he can’t see her clearly. “You come alone to Bali. Do you have husband?”

Dewi giggles.

“No,” Jamie says. “I’m single.”

Nyoman rubs the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses further askew. He looks baffled.

“In the States it’s not so unusual for a thirty-two-year-old to be single.”

“But you will have children?”

“I think so. Did my mother tell you to give me a hard time?” She smiles, but Nyoman just stares at her. “Only kidding,” she says.

“I have many clients from the West. I know that the ways of the world are very different.”

“What do you do?” Jamie asks.

“I am tourism guide. I take tourists to all the parts of Bali and show them our country. It has been a very bad time for my business. Since the bombing. But soon the tourists return.”

“Uncle has no work for a year,” Dewi says.

“And now my business begins to grow,” he insists.

“I’m in tourism, too. I work for an adventure-travel company,” Jamie says. “Since 9/11 we’ve had to develop a lot of trips in the United States and Canada. People don’t want to leave the country.”

“What does this mean—adventure travel?” he asks.

“Our clients want to be active while they travel. So we set up hikes and bike rides and river-rafting trips. They get to see the country in a more intimate way instead of driving through it on a tour bus.”

“Is that reason you were here one year ago?” Nyoman asks. “With adventure travel tour?”

“I was setting up a new tour. I had been here only a couple of days.”

“Which club were you in?” he asks.

“I was heading into Paddy’s Pub.”

“My wife, she was in Sari Club.”

Jamie puts her fork down. The sound it makes against her plate reverberates in the quiet garden.

Dewi retreats a few steps, then turns and walks away.

A blackbird perches on the edge of the table, and Nyoman swats at it. It flies away, squawking.

“I am so sorry,” Jamie says finally. Of course, that’s why he’s a host. There are so many of them. Widows. Widowers. Survivors.

She closes her eyes and sees the face of a blond Australian girl, her mouth open in an unending scream that still pierces Jamie’s sleep. The girl’s dress caught a lick of fire from a burning wall, and in an instant she was consumed by angry flames. Jamie pushes the image from her mind.

“My wife will come back to me another time,” Nyoman says, his voice cheery. “Perhaps as my child.”

“The Balinese believe in reincarnation?” Jamie asks. She should know. She should have learned about Bali. But she has kept herself busy, trekking in Chile, in Morocco, in Bhutan.

And then she remembers an evening on the beach when Gabe explained the Balinese belief in reincarnation. His voice was soft in her ear, and all around them candles flickered in the dark night. The moment fades as quickly as it appeared. Maybe that’s why she can’t trust her memory of Gabe. It’s as hard to catch as a lightning bug. And yet she feels the weight of it, pressing on her.

Nyoman clears his throat. “Yes. Children are the reincarnation of their ancestors,” he tells her.

“And that helps you in your loss?” Jamie asks.

“Yes,” he says. “But there is still a small hole inside me that reminds me I am alone when once I was a man with a beautiful wife.”

Jamie stands under the shower for a long time. Sleep will not come, and yet it’s already two A.M. When the hot water runs out, she lets the cold water sting her skin. Then she towels off and lies naked on the bed.

There’s a fan overhead and it clicks as it circles, as if it catches on something. Jamie’s mind keeps getting caught on something, too. How did she escape memory for so long? She’s an expert at her job, Queen of Constant Motion. Her tour guests ask for longer hikes, higher mountains, more-challenging rivers, and she says: yes, yes, yes. They’re adrenaline junkies, and the minute the high wears off there’s another adventure that beckons.

Now she lies still, like a dead woman. No, if she were dead, her mind wouldn’t race like this. Her heart wouldn’t drum in her chest.

Her skin is slick with sweat. Why doesn’t the damn fan create a breeze in this room?

Miguel pushes his way into her consciousness. She can almost see that petulant scowl on his face. Remember me.

She had come to Bali with him a year ago, crazy in lust with the Chilean guide she had met in Torres del Paine six months before. She had convinced him to come along on her business trip—all the hotel rooms were paid for, and she had enough frequent-flier miles to get him a free flight.

She remembers sex in the large white bed in the large white villa at the luxury hotel in Seminyak. A swim in their private pool. A monkey leapt on the wall separating their villa from the one next door. He watched them making love on the futon, poolside. When they were done, he jumped up and down as if applauding. Somewhere there’s a photo of that monkey, stashed deep inside a box that Jamie never opens.

She and Miguel hiked Mount Batur on their second day in Bali. A local guide picked them up at one in the morning to make the long drive to the volcano. The guide spoke little English—the three of them silently climbed the trail in a cool darkness that thrilled Jamie. Our tour guests will love this, she thought. They reached the top of the mountain at six in the morning, just as the sun broke the horizon. The vivid green landscape of forest and rice paddies brightened with the first rays of sunlight.

On the way down the mountain, Jamie and Miguel ditched the guide. When they came to a waterfall, they stripped off their clothes and swam in the cold basin at its base. Miguel led her behind the curtain of water and they found a cave there, sheltered from the spray. They ducked inside and watched the water tumble in torrents in front of them. The sound was astonishingly loud and urgent. And yet there was something so peaceful about their hideaway. When Miguel kissed her, she thought: Can I love this man?

Above her, the fan whirs and clicks. Whirs and clicks. Her mind catches on memories, halts, drags, and then moves on.

A noise wakes her. Someone’s tapping on the door, a light, insistent sound. She feels the hot pressure of a headache coming on, the dull ache of pain in her arm. Even in her sleep, she cradles her arm as if it were still broken.

It must be late—the room is full of light. She lifts her cellphone—9:30 A.M. She slept for five hours.

Another knock at the door.

“Yes!” she calls out. “I’m coming.”

She stumbles out of bed, wraps herself in a cotton robe, and opens the door.

Nyoman stands there, holding a tray of food.

“Breakfast,” he says.

She’s a mess in her robe, her hair scrambled from sweaty dreams, last night’s makeup smeared on her face. She must look as crazy as he did yesterday. They’re spiritual twins.

“Thank you,” she says, and starts to reach for the tray.

“In the garden,” he tells her, stepping back. He turns and walks toward the table in the middle of the garden.

“I’ll be right out,” she calls, shutting the door. She needs coffee.

She takes a quick shower and throws on linen pants and a T-shirt. She runs a comb through her long auburn hair, then brushes her teeth and looks in the mirror. Her eyes are bloodshot, her face pale. Her scar runs from her eyebrow to her jaw, a thin white line that curves like a comma. The doctor told her that she shouldn’t spend time in the sun, that her scar will burn and change color. She’s not sure she cares.

Again, a knock on her door.

Impatient, she throws it open.

“I’m coming,” she says, and Nyoman turns around and leads her to the garden.

The table is set with a plate of unusual fruit, a bowl of yogurt, a glass of watermelon juice, a basket of rice cakes.

“Looks great,” she says. “Coffee?”

“Tea,” he tells her, and walks away. Where’s his smile this morning?

The teapot perches proudly on the table.

She sits down and takes a deep breath. Now that he’s gone, she’s glad to be awake and sitting in the middle of her private paradise. She nods good morning to the elephant god in the fountain. He’s got a bird sitting on his head, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

There’s no sign of any of the family—they must already be at school or at work. The sun is out, but Jamie sits in the shade of a banyan tree, and for once she hasn’t started to sweat. She hears the trill of a bird, something she doesn’t recognize, and looks up into the tree. She can’t find the bird, but its call is answered by another bird, in the next tree, and suddenly it’s a symphony up there. Her shoulders relax.

She eats her meal slowly. She doesn’t want to leave.

“Barong in three hours,” Nyoman tells her, reappearing at her side. He reaches for her empty breakfast plate.

She has no idea what he’s talking about. Must be something on the itinerary.

“You want more tea?”

“I’ve had plenty. I’ll go walk around town,” she says. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“I come with you,” Nyoman tells her a little forcefully.

“I’ll be fine on my own,” she says. It’s a line she says so often, but this time she’s not sure that it’s true.

The boy and his dog look up, both faces full of delight, when she walks through the gate. They stand at once and cross the street to greet her. One day in Bali and she’s got a frigging family.

“Good morning, miss!”

“Morning,” she says flatly. She needs to ditch him, and fast.

“I give tour?”

“I’m just taking a walk,” she says. “I’m good on my own.”

He’s already following along, like an eager puppy, his own eager puppy like a persistent echo.

She stops mid-street.

“I’m taking a walk by myself,” she says.

He offers a mischievous smile. “You did not sleep well? You still a little bit not nice?”

“I’m always a little bit not nice,” she explains.

“But Bali is beautiful! Bali is paradise!”

“You work for the tourist bureau?”

“I work for you! You tell me what to do and I do it.”

“I want you to walk in the other direction. I want you to do whatever young boys do in Bali. Go to school. Work in the rice paddy.”

“I am fourteen. Done with school!”

The street is filled with Balinese men and women, most headed toward the center of town. She feels a flash of fear, but she pushes it away. For a year now she’s hated crowds. But Gabe taught school in Ubud. He might still be here. She’ll join the morning stampede. She needs to lose the kid, somehow, and then plunge into the heart of town.

In the distance, a neon light flashes BALI BALI CAFÉ.

She thinks: coffee.

“I do have a job for you,” she says, turning toward the boy. His eyes open wide—this kid is desperate for either money or attention. Both, perhaps.

“You want marijuana? You want a man?”

“No!” And then she laughs. “Is that what most women want?”

“Western women funny,” he says, smiling. “Western women want many things.”

“I want—” He is suddenly her genie. Three wishes. I want to sleep without nightmares. I want a medical miracle to cure Larson. I want to go back in time and, when Larson tells me to travel to Bali, I tell him that I’m allergic to paradise.

“Yes, miss?”

“I want coffee. Can you find instant coffee for me?”

“Coffee.” He looks disappointed.

“Is there a store somewhere? I’ll give you money.”

“Sure, miss,” he says, the smile gone from his face.

She takes her wallet out of her pack, pulls out some rupiah, and gives them to him. It is worth ten dollars to get rid of him. She’s sure she’ll never see him again.

“Meet me here at noon. Okay?”

“I am Bambang,” the boy says.

“Bam-bam?”

“Bam-bang! It is my name. What your name, miss?”

“Jamie.”

He bows. “It is very great pleasure to meet Jamie.”

She bows back, smiling at his well-practiced English.

He tucks the money into his pocket and runs down the street. The dog keeps pace at his side.

Jamie finds herself still smiling when he is gone. Bambang.

She looks around—there are throngs of people on the main street in front of her. Ahead, she sees the central market, a teeming mass of color and noise. She takes a deep breath and then slips into the tide of people, as if catching a wave.

As she passes a store, she sees a rack of straw hats, some with wide floppy brims, and realizes she could use one. Already the sun is beating on her head, and her headache is making a fast return. She steps into the store, which smells of incense and oranges. A short heavyset woman greets her with a loud voice. “Hello, hello. I help you.”

“Can I try on a hat?” Jamie asks.

“Yes, yes,” the woman says eagerly. “Very good price. Only one hundred thousand rupiah.”

Jamie steps up to the rack and chooses a hat with a yellow bandanna tied around the crown. It fits her perfectly.

“I give you better price,” the woman says, as if Jamie had been bargaining with her. “Morning price. Only seventy-five thousand.”

“Yes. That’s good.”

Jamie reaches into her backpack and realizes in a panic-fueled second that her wallet is gone. She scrambles through the contents of the pack, finally emptying everything onto the counter in the shop. Passport. Cellphone. Camera. Notebook. Eyewitness Travel Bali guide. Sunglasses case. Lip gloss.

No wallet.

She slaps her pockets—all of them are empty.

The damn kid. How could he have gotten it? The pack was on her shoulder the whole time.

Except when she pulled it out to give him money.

“You have problem, miss?” the woman asks, watching Jamie stuff everything back into her pack.

“I have big problem,” Jamie says.

She heads for the door.

“Hat!” the woman shouts.

Jamie’s still wearing it. She takes it off and puts it on the head of a giant bronze Buddha that sits happily at the front door. The hat fits him, too.

It’s noon and she’s waiting. She already combed the streets of Ubud, looking everywhere for the kid. He won’t show up with her coffee, asking to be caught, but she can’t think of anything else to do. She’ll wait for fifteen minutes, then—well, she doesn’t know what she’ll do next.

What an idiot. A smart traveler hides money in different places and keeps a credit card tucked somewhere apart from her cash. She has always been that smart traveler in the past and has always advised her clients to do just that. She must be more rattled by this trip than she realized. When she changed money at the airport yesterday, she put it all in her damn wallet without thinking. At least her passport is here—in fact, she’s surprised the boy didn’t take that, too.

“You lucky, miss,” a voice says, and she spins around.

Bambang stands there, a mile-wide grin on his face, holding out a jar of instant coffee.

“Where is it?” she asks, her voice loud.

“Here,” he says, waving the coffee. He reads from the jar. “Folgers instant coffee.”

“My wallet,” Jamie says.

“You gave me one hundred thousand rupiah. I have change,” he says proudly, waving the bills in the air. He’s standing too close to her, and she wants to pummel his sweet face with her fists.

“You swiped my wallet.”

The boy takes a step backward, as if already struck by her words.

“No,” he says, his smile fading. “I take money you give me.”

The dog whines, feeling Bambang’s fear.

Jamie eyes him. Why would the kid show up again? Another scam?

“Listen,” she says, softening her tone. “You give it back. I’ll pay you well.”

“I no have wallet,” he says, his voice pleading.

“Twenty dollars,” she tells him. “Give me the wallet and I won’t go to the police. I’ll give you twenty bucks and my promise. You go free.”

“I no have wallet,” he repeats. His face droops in sadness.

The kid is a good liar, she thinks. And she can’t figure out his scam—why is he back here? What can he possibly get out of this?

Is it possible he’s innocent?

“I have no money,” she says, trying for a heartfelt appeal. “I have no way to get any money.”

“No, miss. You wrong. I buy your coffee. I have your change!” Again, he waves her money hopefully, like a flag of surrender.

She turns and starts to walk away.

“Stop, miss! Take coffee! Take change! I no have wallet!”

She keeps walking. The dog’s pitiful whine follows her down the street.

Jamie calls her boss but again gets his voice mail. She tries to remember if Larson is traveling somewhere out of cell reach. He went to Houston last week to consult with a new specialist. No, this week he’s got chemo again. He’s supposed to answer his damn phone.

She calls her mother and leaves a message for her, too.

Then she lies down on the bed in her cottage, watching the errant ceiling fan. When her cellphone rings a few minutes later, she leaps at it.

“Mom!”

“Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”

Jamie sits up. “I’m fine. I didn’t get mugged, but someone stole my money and my credit card. I don’t even know how they got it.”

“Come home, sweetheart.”

“No,” she says calmly. “I’m going to stay. I just need you to wire money.”

“All you have to do is change your return ticket. I’ll pay for the penalty.”

Jamie lies back on the bed, the phone at her ear. Jamie loves her mother’s love and flees from her mother’s love. She stayed with her mom in Palo Alto after returning from Bali the year before, seeing doctors at Stanford to reset her broken arm, to remove the stitches on her face. Rose made a list of all the friends who called Jamie, all the good people who tried to visit and send gifts. But Jamie turned them all away. She took the list and ripped it into tiny pieces, and when she dropped them into the trash can, she saw parts of the names swirl through the air, as if they, too, had been blown apart and were no longer recognizable.

She left Rose’s house a month after the bombing, pushing herself back to Berkeley, to work, to the next Global Adventures trip. She was terrified of spending every evening of the rest of her life watching a romantic comedy on the blue couch in her mother’s den, sharing a bowl of buttered popcorn.

Now, on the phone, they’re both quiet, breathing into each other’s ear.

“Tell me where to wire the money,” Rose says wearily.

“Never mind,” Jamie replies. “I’ll figure this out.”

“You don’t have to stay,” her mother says.

“Actually, I do,” she tells her.

When Jamie was fourteen, she came home from school one day to find her mother baking dozens of brownies. Boxes covered the dining room table, the center island, the kitchen counter. Smoke curled from the edges of the oven—a batch was burning while Rose furiously beat eggs into brownie mix.

Jamie rushed to the oven to pull out the blackened pan. “Mom. What the hell?”

Rose continued to beat the batter into a frenzy.

“Stop. Talk to me.”

“Put those in the garbage,” Rose said, her head down. “I’m starting a new batch.”

Jamie placed her hand on top of her mother’s and held it still. She waited while Rose caught her breath.

“Your father,” she finally said. “He’s leaving.”

“What?”

“He’s tired of marriage. He’s tired of me. I don’t make him happy.”

Her father loved brownies. Jamie turned off the oven. The smell of burned chocolate filled her lungs. Her stomach heaved.

“Come outside, Mom,” she said.

“I can’t. I have to get the next batch in.”

“Now.”

Jamie led her mother into the backyard. They sat down at the table on the patio in the rain.

“You’re getting divorced?” she asked.

Rose looked at her for the first time. “You think it’s my fault. You think everything your father does is right.” Her eyes were burning bright, as if she had a fever.

“That’s crazy,” Jamie said. But already she was thinking: He’ll take me. I’ll go with him.

As it turned out, her father didn’t take her. When he came home that night, he told Jamie that he was moving to Connecticut, that he would send her a plane ticket to come visit him on her school vacations. Already he looked changed somehow. He was wearing a sweater she had never seen before—a dark-green V-necked sweater without a shirt under it. It made him look like a movie star.

“When you visit, we’ll hike the Appalachian Trail,” Dad promised. “It takes months if you do the whole thing. Won’t that be something?”

That night, Jamie rode her bike to the Stanford Park Hotel. Her father had told her that he’d be staying there for a few weeks, until they could “straighten out this mess.” While locking her bike, she glanced through the window and saw him in the hotel lobby. He walked across the room, took a woman in his arms, and kissed her. Jamie felt a gut punch of fury. As Dad stepped back, the woman looked in Jamie’s direction. Miss Pauline. Months earlier, her father had tried to get Jamie to study ballet, even though she hated all things girly. “Why would I want to take a ballet class?” she’d snapped at her father, who made a deal with her: Take one class and they’d go camping that weekend.

Miss Pauline, tall and skinny with blond hair pulled into a tight bun, made all the girls walk around the room as if they were floating. She told them to imagine a string that pulled them up from the crown of their heads. “Grace,” Miss Pauline had promised them. “Grace and beauty.” Jamie had walked out before the class was over. “Why would you want me to do that?” she asked her father later, finding herself close to tears without understanding why. He didn’t have an answer for her, and, in the end, they didn’t go camping that weekend.

When Miss Pauline pointed at the window, Jamie told herself to run, to get back on her bike and ride as far away from the Stanford Park Hotel as she could possibly get. But she was still standing there when her father walked outside and put his hand on her shoulder. She slapped it away.

“She’s, like, twenty years old,” Jamie said. She felt tears on her face and angrily swiped at them with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

“She’s twenty-six,” her father said.

“You are such a liar,” Jamie said.

“I haven’t lied. I’m doing the right thing by leaving.”

“You lie about everything,” she told him. Her father had taken her on her first camping trip. They summited Mount Shasta together. He taught her to rock climb at Pinnacles. They rafted class-five rapids in Idaho the summer before. How could he fall in love with a ballerina?

Over the next years, Jamie visited her dad and Miss Pauline during Christmas break and for a week or two each summer. Pauline had baby after baby, losing both grace and beauty with each passing year. And though Jamie and her dad would take day hikes when they could escape, he never had time to trek the Appalachian Trail. Over the past ten years their relationship had cooled—now Jamie talked to him only a couple of times a year. He didn’t even know she was in Bali last year until weeks after she returned.

Nyoman knocks on the door of the cottage, even though it’s open.

“We leave for the Barong now,” he says. He’s smiling again, tourist guide at his best. He wears a colorful sarong, wrapped like a long skirt around his legs. It’s tied at the waist with a green sash. His shirt is a simple white polo shirt, but he wears a bandanna of some sort around his forehead, wrapped in an elaborate bow.

“Do I need a sarong?” Jamie asks.

“You are fine,” Nyoman tells her.

“I’m not so fine. Someone stole my wallet.”

Nyoman’s face darkens; he lowers his head. “For many years we have no crime in Bali, and now things change. I am sorry for this.”

“I’ll work it out. It happens everywhere.”

“Not in Bali. My country is different.” He looks up at her. Even his sad face makes her feel better.

“What is Barong?” Jamie asks.

“Dance performance. Very important in Bali.”

“I didn’t see it on my itinerary,” she tells him.

“It is on my itinerary,” he says proudly.

“Let’s go, then.” She sighs and then stands up, gathers her bag and her sunglasses, tucks her hair up with a clip.

When they pass through the gate of the compound, Jamie looks for Bambang and his dog. They’re nowhere in sight.

Nyoman leads her to a small car parked down the street. They both climb in and he drives out of town.

“The dance of the Barong,” he explains, “is the story of good and evil. The Barong is a magical lion. He has to fight against Rangda, the witch. We watch the story of the Barong many, many times.”

Jamie doesn’t care about the dance of the lion and the witch, but she likes driving with Nyoman. He’s got air-conditioning in the car, and the view of the countryside is astonishing. They drive through long stretches of rice paddies that follow the land up hillsides and down toward the river. The brilliant blue sky bumps up against the green landscape, and the colors collide. Nyoman falls into a long silence, and Jamie stares out the window.

Several months ago, she sat on the porch of Larson’s Berkeley house, riffling through a pile of catalogs and brochures about Bali, many of them filled with alluring photos of terraced hills like these.

Larson walked outside with two beers and handed her one.

“Put that crap away,” he snapped. “We’re not going to Bali.”

“We?” she asked, as if she didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Global Adventures. You’re off that assignment, remember? There’s not one American who will sign on for a trip to Bali right now.”

“Later,” she mumbled. “A year from now.”

Larson leaned over and swiped all the catalogs off the table. They tumbled onto the floor at her feet.

“Hey!” she yelled.

“Jamie, listen to me.” He squatted down at her side. “I don’t think this is about Bali. You don’t even want to go back to Bali.”

“It’s not for me,” she said weakly. “It’s for a tour.”

“You haven’t stopped thinking about Gabe. Not for one minute since you got back.”

“Cram it, Larson.” She tugged on his ponytail. Before he stood up, he kissed the top of her head.

“Let him go,” he said softly.

Now she glances at Nyoman, who is lost in his own thoughts.

“We are here,” he says finally.

At the edge of a small village, he pulls the car over to the side of a road. They walk into a park where rows of chairs face a makeshift stage. Most of the chairs are filled with children. There are a few old men sitting in the back row and a group of tourists who gather around a Balinese guide. Nyoman leads her to a couple of seats near the front, among the children. The day is hot, and the only shade comes from a large banyan tree.

Music fills the air. The musicians file in from somewhere behind the audience, and they take their seats on the grass at the side of the stage. Jamie can’t identify many of the instruments—this must be a gamelan orchestra. There’s a collection of bronze gongs, a xylophone, drums, flutes, cymbals. The music percolates and flutters.

Jamie would be happy just to listen to this for an hour or so. Already she feels better.

But soon the curtain that stretches behind the platform opens up and a lion scampers onto the stage. He’s a two-man lion, with a shaggy coat made of something that looks like shredded leaves. His face is a spectacular mask, carved of leather, painted gold.

The audience cheers wildly.

“This is the Barong,” Nyoman explains.

The four legs of the Barong, dressed in striped leggings and with bare feet, dance wildly, and somehow the huge head of the beast moves as if it’s light as air. Jamie notices that Nyoman already wears a smile on his face.

“And this is Rangda,” Nyoman whispers in her ear.

Rangda explodes onto the stage. She is more ferocious than the Barong, and more opulent. She has a gold-painted mask with bulging eyes. A long red tongue hangs from her open mouth, reaching almost to her knees.

Rangda looks out at the audience. Her gaze settles directly on Jamie. She cocks her head, as if thinking, and then she bellows. The monster stares at Jamie, and Jamie stares right back. I know you, she thinks.

For the next hour, the Barong and his followers try to kill Rangda, but she is too powerful. They finally turn the daggers on themselves.

When the show is over, and when the applause dies down, Jamie turns to Nyoman.

“Good doesn’t win over evil?” she asks.

“No one wins,” he tells her. “There is always a balance. That is the way of the world.”

“My wife, she was a waitress at Sari Club,” Nyoman says into the silence of the car. “She loved her job very much. She went to work that night—the night of the bombing—and she was very happy.”

They are driving back through the rice fields. These are his first words since watching the performance.

“I’m so sorry,” Jamie says.

“I was angry for a long time,” he tells her.

“At the terrorists?”

“Yes. And I was angry at you. At Westerners. The bombs were meant for you. Not for my wife.”

“You’re no longer angry?”

“No. There is no reason for my anger. It does nothing. This has happened, so it was meant to happen. I accept my loss.”

Nyoman is squinting into the sun, and it looks as if he’s making an effort to believe what he says. Jamie doesn’t know this man or this religion. Maybe acceptance is the easiest thing in the world.

“My wife, she died right away,” he says.

For a year now, Jamie has been haunted by the bodies she saw in the nightclub after the bomb exploded. They hover like shadows in her mind; they whisper to her when she first awakens.

Her body trembles as if she’s freezing. Tonight she will sketch the face of Rangda.

“My wife was the young sister of my friend,” he says. “I knew her when we were children. I was a serious boy, and she was a spirited girl who laughed a great deal.” He stares at the road ahead. “We lived in the same village and our parents knew one another well. I loved her the moment I saw her.”

Jamie smiles and watches Nyoman’s face soften with the memory.

“We married when I was twenty-four and she was sixteen. We should grow old together, but that will not happen.”

He doesn’t speak for a while, and Jamie wonders if his story is over. She cannot imagine his loss.

“She was pregnant with our first child,” he tells her.

Jamie presses her fist to her stomach. Somehow this is worse than all the rest. She had imagined that Nyoman was much older—perhaps grief has aged him.

“She took my hand,” he says, “and led me into the world. Now I go alone.”

They are silent for the rest of the drive home.

Nyoman parks the car near the Paradise Guest House. Jamie gets out and sees the boy right away.

He’s there at his spot on the curb across the street, the thief and his dog. She glares at him and marches toward the cottage gate.

“I have wallet!” he shouts, waving it in the air.

She spins around.

He’s jubilant, running toward her, the dog at his heels.

“I found it. Man stole it. I got back for you this wallet!”

He’s shouting these words as he leaps in the air, as if borne by his happiness. When he reaches her, still waving the wallet, she grabs it.

“God damn you, you little—”

“No! I found it!”

She looks around—Nyoman has disappeared inside his cottage.

She opens the wallet and looks at the wad of bills, the credit card, the driver’s license. She’ll count the money later; she’s sure that a good percentage is missing. Right now she just wants to escape committing homicide. She’s shaking with fury.

“Twenty dollar! Twenty dollar!”

She glares at him. “Scam artist. You steal the wallet, then produce it and expect me—”

“You said. Twenty dollar!”

She shoves the wallet into her backpack and storms across the street, toward the guest house.

Of course, he’s at her side, as persistent as a mosquito.

“Thief is man who lives in cave. He steal wallet before, many times, always tourists. Especially pretty girl. I go find him and I find wallet. I swear is truth.”

Jamie stops and stares at him. Could he be telling the truth?

“I’ll give you twenty dollars. Then I want to never see you again. I want to come out of my guest house and there’s no one on the curb across the street. There’s not even a dog there. You’re nowhere near me when I walk around town. You don’t exist for me after this.”

“I promise. Twenty dollar.”

She pulls her wallet out of her pack and draws a twenty from her wad of bills. His hand snatches it from her fingers, then he’s gone. Gone. The boy and his dog fly down the street, away from town, the dog yipping with delight.

She’s an idiot.

But she’s an idiot with a wallet and some money, her Visa, her driver’s license. Her lifelines.

Inside her cottage, she drops everything on her bed. She rummages through her pack, takes bills and cards and tucks some in her pocket, some in her toiletry kit, some in her backpack.

Before she puts the wallet back in her pack, she pulls out one photograph. She and Miguel stand on the rocky summit of Fitz Roy in Argentina, their arms wrapped around each other, fierce smiles on their faces. She looks at herself as if looking at a stranger. The woman in the photo is beautiful. She has just climbed one mountain and wants to conquer another. Bring it on.

Jamie runs her finger along the scar on her face. Its edges are smooth. She’s curiously numb around the scar, and she likes the sensation of feeling nothing.

In the photo, Miguel isn’t looking at the camera; he’s gazing at her. He doesn’t care about vistas and summits—he cares about love.

A few months later she would leave him and lose him. That same night she would break into a million parts.

Jamie wanders the chaotic streets of Ubud. She had imagined the city as an artistic center—at least that’s what her guidebook had boasted—but this feels as commercial as Seminyak. The tourists are older here than at the beach resorts an hour away, and the shops advertise healing potions rather than Gucci sunglasses. But there’s noise, lots of noise. Some of the restaurants blast music out into the streets. Drivers honk their horns and gun their engines, scooting around the tourist buses.

She finds a small unpretentious restaurant in the center of Ubud and gazes in the window. It looks quiet and calm. A wooden Buddha sits on the bar, as if he had too much to drink and can’t get up. Purple pillows cover the benches of the teak tables. Jamie enters through the open door.

A pretty young woman leads her to a table by the window, overlooking the street. She orders a Bintang beer right away.

The diners, mostly late middle age, speak so loudly that their voices bounce off one another. One table holds two couples, their guidebooks sprawled on the tabletop, their cameras hanging from their necks. At another table, three men argue about the election in Australia.

The waitress serves her an icy bottle of beer. “Your order?” she asks.

Jamie hasn’t even glanced at the menu. She orders nasi goreng—the name of the dish she ate at Nyoman’s house last night.

The waitress nods and disappears.

She sees another table in the corner of the restaurant. A white man and a Balinese woman, with two young kids, an obvious mix of races prettily displayed on their faces. The man must be an expat.

She thinks of Gabe, an expat in Ubud. Could he walk into this restaurant? She has pushed every memory of him far away from her, as if they’re white-hot embers—touch them for too long and she’d burn.

She has no right to see him again.

The waitress brings her a steaming plate of vegetables and rice, and Jamie digs in.

A young couple enters the restaurant, and Jamie looks up from her food. The woman is white; the man looks Balinese, with his dark skin and his broad handsome features. The woman has long blond hair and a dancer’s willowy body. The man is dressed in jeans and a pressed white shirt—his hair swoops down over his forehead and makes him look like a Balinese Elvis Presley. They sit at the table next to Jamie’s.

The woman immediately smiles at her. “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” She has a clipped British accent.

“It is,” Jamie says. “If I get over jet lag, I might even stay up long enough to enjoy the night.”

“You just arrived?” the woman asks.

She’s probably Jamie’s age, but the man looks younger.

“Yesterday,” Jamie says. “Have you been here long?”

“Three years,” the woman says, laughing. “Be careful. The Balinese men have a remarkable power to keep you here.”

The man looks up from his menu and gazes at the woman.

“I’ll remember that,” Jamie says.

“Your first time here?” the woman asks.

“No.”

The woman reaches out her hand across the space between the two tables. “I’m Isabel.”

Jamie shakes her hand. “Jamie.”

“You want to join us?”

“Please,” the man says, smiling shyly.

She takes her plate and beer and slides over to a seat at their table.

“My name is Made,” the man says. He pronounces it Mahday.

“Do you know many Americans who live in Bali?” Jamie asks. The question is out of her mouth before she can stop herself.

The woman wrinkles her brow. “Some. Why?”

“I met a guy here a year ago. An expat.”

“Sounds romantic,” Isabel says.

“It’s complicated,” Jamie tells her.

“Did he live in Ubud?”

“He taught school here. I assume he lived here, but I’m not sure.”

“Well, most of the expats are here in town,” Isabel says. “Ubud attracts the folks who come for more than a spiritual retreat or a weeklong drunk. What’s his name?”

“His first name is Gabe. I don’t know his last name. He’s around forty, I think.”

“I’ll ask around,” Isabel says.

The waitress brings two beers and the couple orders their food. Then Isabel reaches out and touches Jamie’s arm.

“Were you here during the bombing?” she asks quietly. Her eyes trace the long scar on Jamie’s face. Made lowers his eyes.

Jamie nods.

“You came back.”

“There’s an anniversary ceremony—I was invited back. It’s harder than I thought. To be back in Bali.”

“Were you badly injured?” Isabel asks. Her voice is quieter now.

“A broken arm. Some cuts.”

“Made lost a cousin,” Isabel says.

“He was a cook at Sari Club,” Made tells her. “He lived for a couple of months. Very bad. Good that he passed.”

The waitress sets plates on the table.

“I have a girlfriend who teaches at the international school in Denpasar,” Isabel says. “I’ll ask her about your teacher. Give me your cell number.”

“What do you do here?” Jamie asks once they’ve exchanged phone numbers.

“I teach yoga,” Isabel says. “I have a studio in town. I came here to take a workshop and fell in love with my tour guide on a one-day trip to Mount Agung.” She leans over and kisses Made on the cheek. He blushes.

“Maybe I’ll come take a class,” Jamie says. She stands and riffles through her wallet for some bills.

“It’s my pleasure,” Isabel says, pushing the money back toward her. Jamie notices a tattoo that circles Isabel’s thin wrist. It’s a vine of red and yellow flowers.

“Gabe had a tattoo on his forearm,” Jamie says, suddenly remembering. “Of a bird.”

She was lying on her side in the green bed. She opened her eyes and saw the bird, taking flight. She reached out and traced its wings with her finger. He stirred, waking up beside her. He kept his eyes on her.

“That’s you,” he said, his voice as gentle as a blessing. “You’ll fly away soon. And I’ll be left here.”

Nyoman smiles. He smiles and smiles and Jamie chases his smile. He keeps a few strides ahead of her, and she moves as quickly as she can to keep up. But the heat of the midday sun and the heavy humidity make it feel as if she’s pushing through sludge. She just can’t walk fast enough.

“This way, this way,” he says, endlessly cheery.

When she turns a corner, she sees an enormous parking lot on the edge of Kuta where hundreds of people are gathered.

“Nyoman!” she calls out, her voice ragged.

He spins around and waits for her. He’s still smiling.

“We are here. No more running. I was told to be on time. I am never on time. And so I race too fast.”

Jamie can hear herself panting, as if she has never walked a city street much less climbed a few mountains in the past weeks. “Why are there so many people?”

Nyoman turns and looks at the mass of people across the street.

“This is gathering for all survivors and widows,” he says, confused. “Children will give wonderful performance of dance and song for us.”

“There are hundreds of us?” Jamie asks.

She hasn’t bothered to imagine this. Yes, she had said. I’ll go to Bali. She remembers the list of reasons she gave her mother: I’ll support the country, help build back tourism, show the world that terrorism doesn’t win. But she never let a picture come into focus in her mind: a ceremony for people who were injured in the bombing. Her bombing. People she might have pulled from under the rubble. People she might have stepped over on the way out.

“Survivors. Widows. Widowers. There are many of us,” Nyoman says gently. “There is an organization that has been helping us all year. The activities of this week are very important to us.”

“I’m having a little trouble breathing. I don’t know why,” Jamie tells him. Her heart races as if it needs to escape her chest.

“I will be with you,” Nyoman says. “At your side.”

Jamie feels as if she might cry. She swallows.

They cross the street. There are many young people in the crowd—both Westerners and Balinese. A man on crutches stops and high-fives another guy, then they embrace. A redheaded girl with terrible burn scars on her face shouts, “Hey, Charlie!” and Charlie lifts her in the air and spins her around. Survivors.

A small group of Balinese stands to one side, watching a toddler with an oversize beach ball. Their smiles look strained. Widows. Widowers.

“We must check in,” Nyoman says, his voice close to her ear. “We look for Miss Dolly. She is very fat.”

So Jamie squints into the crowd, searching for the fat lady.

“Over there?” she asks.

“Yes.”

They make their way to a middle-aged woman with very short hair and a Humpty Dumpty body.

“Miss Dolly,” Nyoman says.

The woman throws up her arms. “Oh, Nyoman. I am so very glad to see you.”

They hug, and Nyoman looks a little afraid.

“This is my American,” he says.

She puts out her hand. “Jamie Hyde.”

“Dolly Thompson. You’re our only American.”

“There were no other Americans?”

“Seven who died. The families could not come.”

Dolly Thompson sounds Australian. The air is full of loud Australian voices.

“Thank you for coming,” she says. “Many people didn’t want to return so soon. We offered to pair the families of victims and the survivors with a host—like Nyoman—to make the stay a little easier.”

“I’m very glad to be in Nyoman’s home,” Jamie tells her.

“Where do we go?” he asks.

“You’re over there with the families of the deceased,” Dolly says, pointing toward the bleachers at the far end of the parking lot. “And Miss Hyde is at this end. With the survivors.”

Jamie looks at Nyoman. She clamps her mouth shut.

“I stay with her,” he says.

“You can’t,” Dolly says. She’s bossy, as if she’s used to herding kindergarten kids.

“I can. It is children’s performance. At ceremony I stand with widows.”

Dolly shakes her head. “Everyone has to make this more difficult than it should be,” and she walks away, pushing her large body through the crowd.

“Thank you,” Jamie says to Nyoman.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice booms over a loudspeaker. “Welcome. We would like to thank you for coming to Bali for this very important occasion.” Jamie closes her eyes while the same voice speaks in rapid-fire Indonesian.

The show, performed on a stage in the middle of the parking lot, is chaotic and long. One group of Balinese teenagers, dressed in elaborate costume, performs a traditional dance. A choir of young Australian children sings their national anthem. Jamie tries to focus on the entertainment, but she feels fidgety and unsettled.

In the middle of a solo performance—a boy plays an instrument that looks something like a flute and pierces Jamie’s heart with its sad notes—she turns around and finds herself looking at a girl a row behind her, who stares back at her with penetrating blue eyes.

Just like that, Jamie smells fire. She hears screams. She tells herself: It’s a memory. This feels like the beginning of one of her nightmares, but she’s wide awake. It’s broad daylight. There is no fire. There is no bomb. She blinks and the girl behind her tilts her head, as if searching for something in Jamie’s face.

Jamie looks down. The girl wears yoga pants; a prosthetic foot emerges from the bottom of one of the legs.

“You—” the girl says, and then she puts her hand over her mouth.

Once again, Jamie hears screams. She’s back in the nightclub and the air is thick with smoke. A wooden beam has crushed the girl’s leg. She tries to lift the beam but it’s too heavy. The wood is hot, as if already on fire. But the fire is on the other side of the club, sizzling and popping. Jamie can smell burned flesh.

“Stay with us!” she yells, and the girl opens her eyes. Blue eyes. There was no color and then there is the shocking blue of the girl’s eyes.

Now Jamie looks from the girl’s prosthetic leg to her startling eyes. The girl nods her head with recognition, and Jamie turns back. She stands, then steps away from Nyoman, so fast that he never glances in her direction. She pushes through the row of people, bumping shoulders and knees, muttering words. Sorry. Have to go. At the end of the row, she turns and runs.

She runs until the crowd is far behind her. She runs until her breath is ragged and her body trembles with exhaustion.

Then she stops and leans over the curb and throws up.

She wipes her mouth and keeps on running.

“Marry me,” Miguel said, leaning toward her over their plates of seafood curry.

It was her last dinner with him in Bali, almost a year ago to the day, at a restaurant in Kuta, the night windy and hot, the noise of so many young Australians lifting in the air like a constant cheer.

“You’re crazy,” she told him. “We barely know each other.”

He was tall and lanky and his hands felt wonderful on her skin. Somehow they had been together for six months, longer than she’d been with most of the men in her life. They had spent a couple of weeks in Patagonia when Jamie was between trips (“Bold Brazil,” then “Wild Argentina”); he had taught her to ice climb at Fitz Roy and she was a natural on the glacier, so fearless it made her giddy.

“I’m not crazy,” he said. He pushed a box toward her. Her gin and tonics lurched in her stomach as she reached for the gift.

She held it in her hand for a moment without looking at him. The gin slowed down her brain, and she scrambled through her thoughts to find words: No, thank you. I’m not ready. Not me.

She opened the unwrapped box and saw the glint of the diamond, then shut the box as if blinded. She eyed him, a worried look on her face.

His face glowed in the light of the tiki flame. He had a kind of fierce pride, this handsome boy from Santiago.

“Marry me,” he said again.

She shook her head and pushed the box back toward him.

“We’re just starting,” she said weakly.

“Yes,” he said, his voice insistent. “Look at what we’ve begun.”

“I’ve never even been in a long-term relationship,” she told him. She didn’t say: I don’t even know if I’m in love. “I can’t marry you, Miguel. I’m not ready. And I can’t pretend that I’ll be ready in a week or a month. That’s not what I want in my life right now.”

Miguel flinched at her words. He looked stunned, as if he’d never imagined the possibility of her refusal. And why should he? For three days now, they’d played at love, like accomplished actors in the most romantic setting. They kissed in the backseat of their taxi, they held hands while hiking the mountain, they soaped each other’s bodies in the hotel room’s outdoor shower and then made love while the water cascaded over them.

Miguel stood up. His body swayed, and Jamie wondered if he had drunk too much. But he turned and walked toward the door without a word, steady on his feet, not looking back.

Jamie left some money on the table and ran after him.

She stood in front of the restaurant for a moment, frantically searching in both directions until she caught a glimpse of him through the crowd—his royal-blue shirt flashing in the glare of the streetlight. She ran toward him, calling his name.

He stopped but turned his face away from her.

“Miguel—”

“I do not want to be your adventure,” Miguel told her. “I want to be your husband.”

“Don’t walk away from me.”

“I need a drink.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I want to be alone, Jamie. Please.”

He wouldn’t look at her. She dropped his arm.

“Should we meet back at the hotel?”

“Right now I just want a drink.”

He turned and walked toward a bar at the side of the road. Reggae music blasted from the open windows of the building.

“Miguel.”

He shook his head and kept walking. Jamie stood on the sidewalk and watched him go. He walked through the doors of Paddy’s Pub without ever looking back at her.

Jamie stood on the sidewalk, struggling with the urge to run after him. She could join him in the club, lure him onto the dance floor. Don’t think about marriage, she could whisper in his ear. Think about this. Later she could take his hand and lead him to the hotel, where they could make love late into the night.

Or she could walk away. She could go back to her hotel and get some sleep.

Still, she stood there.

She could have told him that she loved him even though she didn’t want to marry him.

But did she love him?

She loved to chase his well-toned legs up a mountain; she loved acrobatic sex with him. But she was hungry to see every corner of the world, to have every adrenaline-fueled adventure. Wasn’t marriage the thing that stopped you?

A young man bumped into Jamie, almost knocking her over. Dazed, she looked around.

“Sorry, miss,” the man said, slurring his words. “Buy you a drink?”

“My boyfriend’s in there,” Jamie said, and she started walking toward the club.

It was then the sky flashed white. Blinding white. The sound came a split second later, a series of small pops, like firecrackers, and then a deafening explosion. She felt herself lift into the air, into the white space above her, and, just like that, she was flying.

Jamie slides down the wall of a building until she is sitting on the street, her back pressed against the cool wood. The farther she ran from the children’s performance, the more the memories chased her. She had to stop. She has found an alleyway that is almost abandoned—the rest of the streets in Kuta are flooded with people.

“Larson?” she says into her phone.

“Jamie—where are you?”

“I don’t know. Lost in Kuta. Why haven’t you answered my calls?”

“I met someone. We went to Point Reyes for a couple of days. No cell service.”

“Christ, Larson.”

“It’s the middle of the night here.”

“She in bed with you?”

“Jamie. What’s going on? You sound awful.”

“I can’t do this. I thought it would be no big deal. But I’m losing it.”

“Maybe you need to lose it a little bit.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m going back to sleep now.”

“No. Wait.”

Larson doesn’t say anything.

“Help me,” she says quietly into the phone.

“Let me go into the other room.” Larson sighs. She hears him walking through the hallway of his Berkeley house. She can imagine him: He’s thrown on his ratty terry-cloth robe. It hangs on his too-skinny body. He will make his way to the leather chair by the fireplace, and, when he sits down, Rosalee, his old cat, will settle onto his lap.

Jamie has shown up at Larson’s house in the middle of the night after a bad fight with a boyfriend; she has slept in his guest room for a week when she was between apartments. He understands her—they’ve shared so many trails in so many obscure parts of the world, it’s as if each knows the landscape of the other’s life.

Once Jamie told Larson that he was her replacement father—a better version of the man who’d walked out of her life. “Don’t do that to me,” he warned her. “Too big a burden.” But he has never failed her. And now he’s dying. Her damn father is alive and well in Connecticut, and this gift of a man in Berkeley is fading away.

“Talk to me, Legs,” he finally says. He’s been calling her Legs since their first marathon hike together, when she kept pace at his side for hours, to his great surprise.

“I’m going to come home tomorrow.”

“The ceremony isn’t until the weekend.”

“I can’t stay.”

“Don’t give up.”

“I saw a girl from the bombing.”

“So?”

“I don’t want to go back. I want to move on.”

“This is moving on.”

“The guy I’m staying with believes that his wife will be reincarnated as his child.”

“Maybe she will be.”

Jamie begins to cry. She saves her tears for Larson. Her mother once yelled at her: “Maybe it would be easier if you weren’t so damn tough.” But Larson knows that she’s not so damn tough after all.

“I’m here,” he says quietly into her ear.

“Listen. Put me on the New Zealand trip. I can get there easily from here. I love that trip.”

“Stay where you are.”

“I’m sitting on the sidewalk like a beggar. I’m probably sitting in someone’s pee.”

“Then that’s exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

“You sound like Nyoman.”

“Who’s Nyoman?”

“My host.”

“His wife died?”

“In the bombing.”

“Maybe it works. His philosophy.”

“Not for me,” Jamie says.

“Give it a chance, Legs,” Larson says. His voice is low and serious.

“I didn’t even ask how you’re feeling,” she says, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“I’m doing fine,” he says, too quickly. Jamie realizes that he’s lying—there is no woman in his bed.

Even though she knew that pancreatic cancer was a death sentence the moment Larson told her about his diagnosis, she hasn’t let herself think about the end. His end. She’s the only one who can take care of him. She doesn’t know if she’s big enough for that job.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Jamie finally says.

“Oh, I’ll be haunting you forever. That’s my plan. I’ll tuck myself into your backpack and follow you around the world.”

A couple of Balinese kids race down the alleyway, chasing after a puppy. They pass by her as if she’s invisible.

Jamie stands and looks at the sky—the setting sun sends out streaks of red across the cloudless blue.

“Go on back to sleep,” Jamie tells Larson.

“Stay in Bali, Legs,” he says, and hangs up.

Jamie puts her phone into her pocket and starts walking.

It takes her a long time to find the parking lot. Nyoman sits peacefully on a bench at the back of the now empty lot. All the bleachers have been put away and the stage has been taken down. He watches Jamie walk toward him.

“I’m sorry,” she says when she reaches him.

“In my garden is a sculpture of Ganesh.”

“The elephant?”

“Yes. The elephant. He protects us from the demons. I wait for you. I will be your Ganesh.”

Jamie dreams about Bambang. He’s on a bicycle, dog at his side, and Nyoman runs after him yelling, “Stop! Thief!” Bam-bang laughs, the dog yips, and Nyoman plunges a dagger into the boy.

Jamie sits up in bed, her heart jackhammering.

“Bambang,” she says aloud, and she realizes that she needs his help.

She throws on clothes. She should shower, but she doesn’t want to take the extra time.

She opens the door to her room and sees Nyoman setting the garden table for her breakfast.

“I’ll be right back,” she calls to him.

He looks up, surprised, as she races past.

She opens the gate to the street and, sure enough, Bambang is waiting for her, as if summoned. His dog waits, too, ears perked, tail wagging. If Bambang had a tail, it, too, would be wagging.

She hurries across the street. The boy looks worried.

“Bambang in trouble?” he asks.

“You’re always in trouble,” she says. “But I couldn’t care less. I need your help.”

His wide smile lights up his face.

“Twenty dollar,” he says.

She pulls a twenty out of her back pocket. His eyes open wide.

“Find a man for me. You can do this. You probably know everyone in this country.”

“Only this town.”

“We’ll start here. Ubud. A year ago he taught school in Ubud.”

“Your boyfriend?” Bambang sings, taunting her.

“Not my boyfriend.”

“Your baby daddy?” he asks, grinning wildly.

“How the hell do you know that expression?” she asks, laughing. “No, he’s not my baby daddy.”

“Yoga lady teach me that. Baby daddy.”

“Isabel?”

“No. Lots of yoga ladies here. This one Lucy.”

“I don’t care about yoga ladies. You find this man.”

“I promise you,” Bambang says proudly. “What is his name?”

“Gabe. I don’t know his last name. You gotta earn your twenty. Here’s what I know. He’s American. Schoolteacher. Green eyes. Dark hair and a beard. Tattoo of a bird on his forearm.”

“What’s forearm?”

“You know baby daddy and you don’t know forearm?” Jamie asks. She shows him her forearm. “Here.”

“He teach in Ubud now?”

“I don’t know. You start here.”

“This cost more than twenty,” the boy says, crossing his bony arms across his chest.

“You got a list of services? It says somewhere: Find missing man … what—forty dollars?”

“Forty dollar,” he tells her.

“You find him, you get the other twenty.” The dog rubs against her leg, as if adding his own plea for more money. “What’s the dog’s name?”

“TukTuk.” Bambang runs down the street, waving his twenty in the air, TukTuk bounding after him with paroxysms of joy.

“Boy is no good,” Nyoman says when Jamie sits down for breakfast.

“He may be good for something,” she tells him.

“Ubud does not want trouble.”

“He’s an orphan?” She puts her napkin on her lap and drops a tea bag into her teacup. Nyoman pours hot water into the cup. We’re like an old married couple, she thinks.

“He came here one year ago. No one knows where he came from, who are his people. Bambang is Javanese name.”

“Maybe he ran away from home.”

Jamie eats her yogurt and fruit while Nyoman stands over her. Usually she waits until he disappears into his cottage, but she is starving this morning.

“This is not America. We do not have children who run away, who live on street, who play tricks on tourists. We have community. Boy does not have community.”

Jamie feels an odd kinship with the outcast kid.

Nyoman walks back to his cottage with the empty tray and the teapot.

Jamie imagines a woman inside Nyoman’s cottage, greeting him with a smile. Nyoman places his hand on his wife’s round belly. She reaches up and straightens the glasses on his nose.

“They will be crooked again in another moment,” he tells her.

“For now, you are perfect,” she says, smoothing his hair on his head.

Jamie stands in front of Isabel’s yoga studio in the center of Ubud, watching class through the window. The roomful of remarkably flexible people move gracefully through pretzel poses. She hopes they’re close to the end of class—she’s hot and impatient. She has walked through town, trying to figure out some way to find Gabe or to miraculously spot him on the street. She’s a Nancy Drew failure. She doesn’t have a plan; she doesn’t have a hope of finding him. Why has she taken on this mission?

It’s as if she has now turned those embers of memory into a raging fire. She can’t put it out. She has to find him.

Finally the yogis settle onto their backs for corpse pose. Jamie is glad she didn’t join the class. Her muscles are too tight from scrambling up mountains; her mind is too frantic for an hour and a half of focused breathing.

The yoga class ends with a series of oms. The yogis file out, many of them hugging one another as they part. Isabel is the last to leave the studio.

“Jamie!” she calls, and she kisses her on both cheeks.

“Looked like a good class,” Jamie tells her.

“Join us next time.”

“I’m curious—did you do this before you moved to Bali?”

“No, I was an accountant in London.”

“Come on.”

“Really. I needed Bali in a big way.”

Jamie can’t imagine this woman behind a desk in an office, a computer in front of her, her legs primly crossed, serious pumps dangling off her feet.

“Listen. I haven’t made any progress finding that guy I told you about. Gabe. I was wondering if you talked to your friend at the international school.”

“I did. I was going to call you.” Isabel shakes her head. “She doesn’t know anyone named Gabe.”

“Damn.”

Isabel puts her hand on Jamie’s arm. “Don’t be discouraged,” she tells her.

They kiss goodbye, and Jamie heads down the street as if she has someplace to go.

She turns down a path between two buildings, and within minutes she’s walking in the middle of a rice paddy. The city disappears and the rich green landscape surrounds her. She breathes more easily. The sun beats down on her, but she’s wearing a broad-brimmed hat she bought earlier this morning.

There’s a dirt path that runs along a ridge between the rice fields. A sea of green spreads before her. The trail leads her to a river and a thicket of trees, the only visible shade. She sits on a rock and takes off her shoes, letting the cool water stream over her feet, then pulls out her cellphone. Amazing—the middle of nowhere in the middle of Bali, and she’s got full reception. She calls her mother.

“Jamie!” Rose shouts as if she’s been lost for weeks.

“I got my wallet back,” Jamie tells her.

“Really?”

“I was probably scammed, but most of my money was there. The thief is my new best friend.”

“Jamie, don’t get involved with bad characters over there.”

“He’s just a kid,” she says. “And I’m not getting into trouble.”

“How are you, sweetheart?”

“Not so great.” Jamie’s voice breaks. She doesn’t want to cry.

“Oh.” Rose’s voice falters, too.

Jamie stands up and takes a step into the river. The cold water rises up her legs and soaks her shorts.

“I tried to find Gabe,” she says.

“I wondered about that,” Rose murmurs.

“Suddenly it seemed important to me.”

She takes another step into the river. The water covers her stomach, her breasts. It’s almost up to her chin. She feels off balance, and it’s not just the rocky footing. It’s the heat and the cold, the quiet and the noise.

“You might be disappointed if you find him,” Rose says. “Sometimes you turn men into heroes when they’re mere mortals.”

Jamie knows that her mother’s referring to her dad. Has she done the same thing with Gabe?

“Hang on,” Jamie says.

She slogs her way out of the river. Water pours from her clothing.

“Where are you?” Rose asks.

“I have no idea,” Jamie says. She walks back out from under the trees and stands at the edge of the rice field. The heat of the sun envelops her.

“Thanks, Mom,” Jamie says.

“For what?” Rose asks.

I need to find him in order to let him go, Jamie thinks. But she doesn’t say a thing.

Bambang is waiting for her in front of the Paradise Guest House. He leaps up from the curb and runs to meet her in the street.

She feels a momentary panic. What if he’s found Gabe? What if she sees him again? Why has she failed to imagine the rest?

“I have name! I have name!” Bambang yells.

The dog leaps on Jamie and almost knocks her over. He licks her legs, her hands, her feet.

“Easy, TukTuk,” Jamie says, petting his velvety fur.

“Mr. Gabe Winters!”

“Gabe Winters,” she says, trying out the name. The words fit in her mouth as if they had been there, waiting for her. “Where is he?”

“Twenty dollar,” Bambang says.

“You didn’t find him,” Jamie argues.

“I found name! Twenty dollar!”

“Where is he?”

“Twenty dollar.”

“Damn you,” she says, digging into her wallet. She pulls out a twenty. Bambang takes it and whoops with joy.

“I go to tattoo girl,” Bambang says. “She paint bird on Mr. Gabe Winters three years ago. She remember every tattoo.”

“Does she have an address for him?”

He shakes his head.

“How do I find him?”

“Twenty more dollar.”

“You ever do anything out of the goodness of your heart?” Jamie asks.

“No understand.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“You no happy? Have name now.”

“Yes, I have his name. Find his address,” she says. She pulls out another twenty and tucks it into his hand.

Jamie goes to an Internet café in the center of town. Almost everyone in the café looks like a first-generation hippie—she’s in a Woodstock time warp. The waiter wears a ponytail and a Grateful Dead T-shirt; he’s got a flying-high smile on his face. She orders an iced mint tea and hides behind a computer at a corner table.

She Googles Gabe Winters and finds nothing that relates to the man she met in Bali. Next she tries international schools in Bali and copies the list in her notepad. She finds phone numbers and starts calling. “No, there’s no one here by that name,” she’s told, over and over again. The harder it is to find him, the more driven she becomes.

Gabe had a sister in Boston, she remembers, but when she Googles Winters Boston she gets reports on the weather. She tries Gabe Winters Boston and finds one article:

Boston Couple Creates Foundation in Memory of Their Son

Gabe Winters and Heather Duckhorn have created the Ethan Winters Foundation to support research on childhood meningitis. Ethan Winters died of meningitis at the age of four.

Jamie remembers sitting with Gabe on the patio one morning. The pale-pink hue of the sunrise colored the mist over the lily pads. “When I woke up this morning,” he told her, his eyes focused on the water, “I realized that I had dreamed about Ethan. That’s the first time I saw him in a dream.”

Jamie types Ethan Winters Foundation on the computer. She finds the website devoted to the foundation and scans the home page. It’s a mess—there’s too much info, all of it screaming for her attention. She races past words: meningitis, donate, events, survivors’ stories. None of it leads her to Gabe.

“Will you be done soon?”

She looks up, completely disoriented. A skinny teenage boy stands at her side, impatiently hopping on his toes. He’s amped up on something, or maybe it’s the music blasting through his headphones.

“No,” she snaps. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Chill, sister,” the kid says, and moves on to the next occupied computer.

Jamie sets her eyes on the screen and tries to slow her thoughts. Find him. He’s here, somewhere.

She clicks on the link for the board of directors. Gabe’s name is last on the list. His short bio reads: “Gabe Winters lives in Bali and teaches at the Ubud Community School of Bali.”

Jamie signs off the computer and races out of the café.

Bambang sits on the curb across from the Paradise Guest House. He waves cheerfully when Jamie walks toward him.

“You need me?” he calls.

“You know where the Ubud Community School is?”

“Yes,” Bambang says proudly.

“Can you take me there?”

“Yes, yes,” he says merrily. “Only two dollar.”

“You’re a taxi service now?”

“Bambang tourist guide.”

Jamie pulls out two dollars and places it in his open palm.

“Right now?” he asks.

“Right now.”

Bambang and TukTuk lead her up the road, away from the center of town.

Jamie remembers how one tourist she guided on a mountain hike in Chamonix described her fear of descending a knife-edged ridge that was exposed on both sides: thirst, a cold sweat, tingly arms. Jamie’s got it all right now. And she’s just walking on a street in Bali.

“Mr. Gabe there? He teach at school?” Bambang asks.

“I think so,” she says.

“You fall in love with Mr. Gabe?”

“A tourist guide learns not to ask questions.”

“You tourist guide?”

“Too many questions,” Jamie says. “Let the tourist tell you what she wants. You’d be surprised how much she’ll tell you.”

“You too quiet. You tell nothing.”

“Give me time,” she says.

They walk up the long road out of town. It’s the end of the day—there’s no reason Gabe would still be at school at this hour. But Jamie feels compelled to see the place, to know where he works.

“There is school.” Bambang points to a small building set back from the street. Unlike the many stone structures in the area, this one’s made of bamboo—it looks a little bit like a tree house. Jamie stops where she is, across the street, and Bam-bang comes to a quick halt.

“We go in?” he asks.

“No, I’ll wait here. Your job is done.”

“I wait with you.”

“No. I’m good. Go on, Bambang. Go spend your money somewhere.”

The boy looks disappointed; even TukTuk hangs his head.

Two women open the front door of the school and pass through. As they approach the street, Jamie hears one say, “I’d rather be home grading papers than sit through that again.”

The other woman laughs and they kiss each other goodbye.

Jamie fishes two dollars out of her pocket. She hands it to Bambang. “Get lost,” she says.

He and TukTuk race down the street, back toward the center of town.

Jamie leans against a tree. A man walks out of the front door of the school. He’s Balinese. Not Gabe. She takes a deep breath.

She remembers a day, a year ago, in the beach cottage. She lay in bed, two days after the bombing, trying to push ugly images of the burning nightclubs out of her mind. Think of Miguel, not the bombing, she told herself. Remember how he sang Spanish ballads to you from the top of the mountain. Remember his wild roar when he jumped from a cliff into the Pacific. Remember his sweet breath on you as he slept with his face on the back of your neck. All of the memories collided with the last image, of his broken body in her arms. She felt a rising panic. She pulled herself out of bed and walked, groggy and unsettled, out of the house and into the garden.

Gabe sat on the patio, reading a book. He looked up and saw that her face was wet with tears. He stood and moved toward her.

“Miguel’s gone,” she said quietly.

She stepped into his arms. And then, before she let her body press against his, she wrenched herself away from him.

Even now, a year later, she feels the pull of that moment. Toward Gabe. Away from Miguel. She feels herself stepping back, away from the school, as if she can change what she did then and what she is about to do now.

Then the door of the Ubud Community School opens again and a small group walks out. One is an old man, hobbling with a cane. Not Gabe. One is a woman with a child in hand. And then, finally, a man stands alone in the doorway. He looks around and his eyes fall on Jamie.

Gabe.

In that moment it’s as if her tough exterior falls away—skin and muscle and bone—and all that’s left is her pulsing heart. Now she remembers each complicated day after the bombing. All of it was absolutely true. So, too, are her unsteady legs and the sound of her heart filling all the space inside her.

He is tall, with black hair peppered with gray. His face is clean shaven; the beard is gone. He runs his hand through his hair, and she remembers the gesture just as she remembers what happens next—a lock of hair falls onto his forehead, untamed. He’s wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans and carries a messenger bag over one shoulder. She watches and waits: He doesn’t smile, but he begins to walk toward her.

Breathe, she reminds herself. And, without thinking, she’s counting backward, as if counting the steps between him and her. She takes a long deep breath between each number as he approaches.

He blinks his eyes and his face pinches with concentration. “Jamie,” he says.

She can’t speak. Her mouth feels dry and unfamiliar.

He reaches out and touches the scar on her face. She remembers how he would change her bandage, his fingers so gentle on her wound. Now, even though the skin is numb, a jolt of electricity runs through her. She trembles and he takes his hand away.

She watches his green eyes. She waits for him to speak. But he is silent.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” she says finally. She hears the words in her head, and they reverberate, as if she’s been saying them over and over again for months. In a way, she has.

“Jamie,” he says. Then he shakes his head.

His hand reaches toward her face again. This time he touches her lips.

“Please,” he says. “Go home.”