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Luc, somehow—I
wanted
that to be true. And I reasoned that this was logical—perhaps the cyber-invader’s father had passed his skills to his son as Luc had passed his to me.
    I often told myself I had no need of either money or friends. But when that ghost asked me to do one last job—the one in that hospital—there was no way to refuse.
    The job had been paid for in advance, by people who couldn’t bring themselves to do what their dear friend wanted them to do so terribly.
    Their dear friend, dying. Kept alive because experimenting on humans wasn’t allowed in America, and nobody had yet decoded HIV.
    That’s when I found Dolly, but finding her didn’t push either of us off our paths, not right away. She left for some place where they were treating advanced cancer patients with blackmarket stem cells. I stayed to finish my job.
    I could have told her a bunch of lies. But considering what I’d been doing when we met, that would have been stupid. Not stupid because she would have seen through them, but stupid because I didn’t want her to think I would lie to her. Ever.
    Just because I couldn’t explain any of that to myself didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I somehow knew I needed her to trust me if there was ever to be a chance for … for things I couldn’t allow myself to think about.
    A few months passed.
    She never called the number I’d left with her, and I tried to make myself stop wishing she would.
    Even though I now knew that Dolly was real, I had been trained never to wallow in hope—such feelings would only drip acid on my heart.
Je ne regrette rien
.
    But I
did
hope. Not despite my will, but because of it. And every time that acid rained, I welcomed its burn. If my heart would only be strong enough, maybe that acid would etch in an image I might never again see with my eyes.
    It was as if trying so hard not to wish for something
made
it happen. When she called, I didn’t waste the chance. I asked her if she would sit with me long enough for me to say what I wanted to say. She didn’t bother with a bunch of questions, not even “Why?” She just told me where she was.
    I didn’t tell her a story. I told her the truth. Not just about what I’d been, but what I wanted to be.
    We had plenty of time then. Almost a week. Mostly, I listened. I found out that Dolly had seen too much war—too much pain, suffering, death. The worst had been right in Switzerland, in a place where they treated torture victims. She told me she’d had to get out before she became like one of them. I didn’t understand what she meant, not then.
    Dolly’s dream was to live somewhere on the Oregon coast. She loved the idea of being so near the ocean. One day, she was going to buy a little cottage there. She had scouted around for a long time before coming to that decision. But now she was sure—all she wanted was to be in a place where she could live in peace.
    Only the last part of what she said I felt inside myself, as well. True North. That had always been my dream, too.
    I’d had only one reason to live—it was second nature to me to avoid death. But, afterward, I had two more: to make Dolly’s dream come true, and to be part of it.
    I found the place Dolly wanted—it
had
to be, I told myself; it was just as she’d described it.
    I asked her to come and see it. Just
look
at it for herself—see if I hadn’t truly been listening.
    And to look at me—look at the man I
could
be. She had to know what I’d been doing in that jungle. So much blood had leached into that ground that even the most beautiful blossoms were poisonous. But I told her the whole truth of my life anyway, pushing all my chips into the middle of the table. Everything I had. Even the heart I thought had finally died with my last friend, Patrice.
    I had to start from the beginning. The beginning as I knew it—the first years of my life were gone forever. That “clinic” in Belgium told me—in English, not in French—that I had