Marie deferred to Jason on matters of security; Jason deferred to Marie on matters of baby-tending. In all, though, he kept his distance from the baby. It took her a while to talk him into watching Drächen during the afternoon, so that she could shop alone.

"What will you tell the shop ladies who ask about her?" He'd asked.

"My neighbor is watching her."

"Why don't they know your neighbor?" Drilling her.

She sighed. "My friend is visiting?"

"You can only use that for about a week."

"So, next week, I'll take her with me again." He still wasn't comfortable with it, but he said ok. She smiled, happy to have some liberty after five months, and kissed him goodbye.

A day that week, she came in from a shopping trip to hear Drächen's cries coming from the apartment. Shit! Where was Jason? She ran upstairs, only to find Drächen on the bed, and Jason, brow creased, regarding the wailing baby from the chair. "Jason! What is wrong with you?" she hissed. He stared blankly as she picked the baby up and murmured to her. Marie sang and walked up and down, but the frantic infant was too far gone to settle.

Sitting on the bed, Marie quickly opened her blouse and offered her breast to the hysterical child. Drächen latched on, gasping a bit every now and then as she regulated in the comfort of her mother's arms. Eventually, the exhausted baby fell asleep. Marie continued to hold her close, brushing her lips against the fuzzy hair on the top of the little girl's head until Drächen was limp. Carefully setting the child down on the bed, Marie turned to Jason, fastening her blouse.

'What happened? What is wrong with you?" she asked again, more gently this time. "That 's a baby; when she cries, you pick her up!"

"I just, I couldn't…" Jason's eyes were blank. "I was afraid I would hurt her."

Marie drew back. "Hurt her? How?"

"I shouldn't touch her. I don't deserve her." Marie was positively puzzled. Jason sighed, rubbed his aching eyes. Told her everything about his last night in Paris, recounted every detail of his recovered memory: how he masterminded the killing of Wombosi, and why he couldn't bring himself to do it in the end. "Conklin said I was a 30 million dollar weapon. For that kind of money… Wombosi is the only one I remember, and that mission was a failure. How many others were there that were successes?" His forehead was wrinkled, his eyes haunted and bloodshot. She could tell that the headache was bad today.

Marie knelt down beside him, taking his face in her hands. "Jason, listen to me. What you did or didn't do before is in the past. That night in Paris, you didn't have a choice. You were trying to find the truth and you did what you had to do to survive. You didn't pull the trigger on that boat; you didn't hurt those children. You wouldn't do any of those things again."

"Wombosi, he didn't deserve those children or not deserve them. He was their father. You're Drächen's father, and she doesn't know anything except that she needs you. All she has is love for you. Let her love you. We both love you so much."

Marie went to the bed then, and picked up the sleeping baby. Took her and deposited her into Jason's scarred hands. Drächen stirred and gurgled in her sleep, opening her eyes and rolling tightly into her father's chest. For a brief moment, she held Jason's gaze, with the least judgmental eyes he had ever seen, except, perhaps, for Marie's. Marie encircled them both with her arms, sinking to her knees and looking up into Jason's face. What she saw there, as he looked at his child and his brow became smooth, she would never forget.

After that, Jason opened himself to family life. Drächen warmed up to him quickly. He took over middle-of-the-night diaper duty. Marie canonized him for this, despite knowing that he was usually awake in the night anyway. He would return the clean and dry baby to her side of the bed, and then curl himself around them as they drifted back to sleep. She felt a security that had never been present in her life before. Jason was the only person who had ever come back to her. Twice now, he had come back.

She knew he didn't sleep much. He had dreams that troubled him. Sometimes he flailed around in bed. By tacit agreement, Drächen was always between Marie and the wall, never between her parents. Marie would huddle protectively around Drächen until the dream passed or he awoke, then roll over to cradle his sweaty head, the baby safely on her other side. Jason would be up when she and the baby awoke, and the kitchen would be spotless, or all of Drächen's tiny clothes would be folded and arranged neatly in their drawers by article and color. Jason would be sitting in the dark with the shutters closed, pale and anxious. The bright sunlight aggravated his headaches.

On those days, Marie would put the "Be Back Soon" sign up in the window during afternoon naptime, but would stay home instead of shopping. She would talk to Jason: telling stories, teasing him about keeping the baby up instead of the other way around, trying to get him to laugh with her. Coaxing him into their bed for the sweetest relief. Drächen always slept right through, and they would have whatever fresh fruit and old bread they had lying around for supper on those nights.

He told her about his dreams, so vivid, so populated by Conklin, so violent; he believed they had to be memories percolating up from behind the protective balm of amnesia. Marie listened to it all, wondering privately whether they were memories or just the projections of a person feeling guilty over what little he could remember. In any case, she could see why he couldn't sleep; why he wouldn't want to, even.

As much as the things he described doing were abhorrent to her, she wished relief for him. She had immense forgiveness for the man who wanted to do the right thing; the man who came for her with an apology. The man who paid for his past in headaches and night terrors, in a life lived on the margins. The man whose love for their child was written all over him whenever he looked into the blue eyes that were his gift to her.

Another day, a week after she had used up the friend story with the shop ladies, Marie had something extra when she and Drächen came back from shopping: a blank book, bound in leather. "It might help you piece things together," she said, "If you write the dreams down."