The staff here are discreet to the point of invisibility. Dinner, or is it breakfast, is waiting on a table out on the deck. Do they lay out food every day as if Red will come, Lizzie wonders. As the sun creeps down from its zenith, a woman in a maid's uniform comes to clear away the dishes, and stops dead, staring.
Red smiles and waves his hand at the empty plates. "Thank you." He adds something in a language Lizzie does not recognise - some Pacific tongue lost to textbooks but mastered, of course, by Red.
He is remarkable.
He is, now, stronger and more vibrant than Lizzie has ever seen him. His every move is precise and graceful, his fingers embracing the white porcelain teacup, his head and hat tilted back at matching angles as he scans the turquoise horizon. He glows.
Did I look like that, she wonders. When he found me again, hiding from my criminal past at the FBI, is this thrilling perfection what he saw? It is mesmerising.
Food has revived her. She stretches, Red's gaze travelling warily over her, and turns to him. "So, what, now we're all even?"
"What's that?" His eyes zip to her face.
"You were scared of Berlin because he had twice the power. But it turned out he didn't. I did. Now I don't. So, what, back to the status quo?"
He is blank for a second. Then he sighs a smile. "Not quite. Revenge must occur. I need to resurrect my house. I have done what I can to protect them." He places his hand on his waistcoat, over his heart. "I have obligations."
"Are they..." She does not have the words. She has questions she cannot ask, here, in the dreamlike paradise of Red's island bolt hole. If Berlin was a king, then who, now, is Lizzie? Where is her mother? Did everyone die in the fire she barely remembers, or no one? "Uncharm me," she says. She pats her throat for the golden key but it is gone. But Red is powerful now. He doesn't need the key. "Give me my memories back."
Red looks incredibly shifty. Guilty.
"What?" demands Lizzie. She steps nearer and looms over him in his steamer chair.
Typically, he does not get up. He angles his head back at her and squints against the twin glares of the sun, and her wrath. "I can't."
She waits.
"You were so young. Anything you might naturally remember would be so vague..."
It takes a moment.
He waggles his head in a 'Well, you can't have everything,' kind of way. "Your memories are gone, Lizzie. I'm sorry."
That's it. Lizzie has been good, she has been patient and understanding and most of all she has given him freely his power back and now he says he can't help her-?
She makes a noise which is not any word, and spins away.
"Lizzie-"
He must know that this time, smarm won't work, because he stops short.
She means to stroll across the beach in impressive, furious strides, but actually it is baking out there and so she just stands at the edge of the deck, clenched, her face turned away.
And she lasts quite some time, convincing herself that as the daughter of Berlin she is both owed her memories, and can perfectly survive, as she always had, without them. But why should she have to?
Red has taken her life, her husband, her very self away from her and now he says he cannot restore the only connection she ever had with who she truly was? She could scream, she could hurl fire at him, she could -
Cry.
"It's so beautiful here," Lizzie says, and with the words her shoulders slump. She slides down to the wooden deck and puts her sleeve over her face. She doesn't speak but tight sobs escape from behind the shield of her arm.
Red lowers himself to the floor too, leaning against the clapboard wall of the hut. He sits with knees raised, arms clasped around them.
After a while the sun drifts behind clouds and the sky becomes silver and lilac. The sea collects the colours and shows them back to the sky in new, perpetually changing combinations. Heat pours up from the sand.
"It gets sweltering here at night," Red says. "The darkness comes in and the air is full of moths seeking the least bit of brightness in a world of enveloping black heat. You should take off your coat. Heat stroke is a nasty condition and this place only has one bathroom."
She doesn't move.
"Things ease a little once the moon rises," Red says. "There's some mysterious draw to moonlight, don't you think? I always think that moonlight makes all bad deeds fade and shows good deeds for what they are, selfish acts disguised as altruism."
At last she replies. "Not everyone shares your cynical view," she says.
"There are many acts done in the name of good which serve only the secret desires of the doer."
This gets silence. He expected nothing less.
He takes off his hat and lays it gently on the floor a little way off. His coat he removes and folds too. Slowly and exactly, he rolls up his shirt sleeves.
"You look like a newspaper editor in an old movie," she says.
There is reluctant acceptance in her voice.
He realises she has been peeking past her sleeve. "I can't edit the things I'd really like to," he says. "But that's life."
He draws her jacket off her shoulders and places it next to his. "Silk," he exclaims as his fingers brush the sleeve of her blouse. "I knew it. Nothing else has such simple grace. Such wonderful drape."
"I've always liked the moon," she says.
And in one moment the mood has changed. He sees her jaw relax, her eyelashes dip. This is not defeat, he knows, only anger turning to sadness. He recognises that very well.
He picks up the thread at once. "Moonlight bares us, shears away falsehood and leaves our raw selves shivering in the glare like a swimmer just dragged onto the deck of the rescue boat. It's hard to lie under moonlight."
He pulls two glasses and a bottle of champagne from a nook in the front wall. Lizzie wipes her face with her sleeve and wrinkles her nose. She picks up one glass, inspects it, puts it down.
Red leans back once more and takes Lizzie's hand. With his other hand he begins unbuttoning his waistcoat.
"I always wished I could keep a bit of moonlight just for myself," he says, his gaze sliding from the line between sea and sky, to the silver tingeing Lizzie's cheek.
Lizzie lifts her eyebrows, then raises her empty glass to the sky and it blooms, brims with moonlight. She smiles.
His heart begins to rattle its cage. Did she truly do that?
"Here. A toast." She takes his glass and charges that too.
"I'm not sure I should drink from this particular cup," he says. "When a beautiful woman offers me a sip from her chalice, I usually discover that it's poisoned."
She smiles and dips her middle right finger into the silver liquid. "Here."
She touches his mouth with her fingertip. And again. Dip, touch. She repeats the action, pressing her finger against his lower lip a little more each time. "Not poisoned," she whispers.
Red stares. Under this bright mercury sky she is transformed. And her caress on his mouth, droplets of her charm, is frightening and erotic.
Lizzie pushes the glass aside, slides her right arm behind Red's neck to swing herself round and sit astride his knees, and kisses him.
Red's lower lip gleams silver with the drops of moonlight she placed there. His eyes are bright too, eager and - afraid. She has never seen him anything other than in control. Now he is looking at her in wonder, as if he senses what she is about to do but does not trust himself to believe it.
She kisses him and tastes cognac, and wariness. She is plunged into his warm, old fashioned scent - cedarwood and light orange mingling with vanilla, a fragrance combining luxury and simplicity, like sipping secret hot chocolate at the opera, like sprawling on a bare deck in front of a mesmerising ocean.
His hands come up to curve around her ribs. He closes his eyes beneath her kiss. She runs her fingers through his hair. It is fine and soft and at this moment seems to be made of moonlight. He was always handsome, but now she thinks him exquisite - the knowledge of years distilled in his firm touch, tempered with caution for this new thing.
She leans back and he is smiling, eyes shut.
"Glorious," he says. His hands smooth down her blouse. "I had no idea."
"Hush." He talks too much. Luckily she is the silent type. She runs her finger round his collar, loosens his tie - smooth and heavy in her hand - and kisses his cheek, other cheek, all around his mouth. By the time she reaches his lips again his grip on her has tightened and he is pulling her closer, pressing them together.
The sky is huge tonight, lit from horizon to horizon with a soft grey glow. Beneath it Lizzie feels how trivial is this moment with Red. Why has she waited? Whatever they do or don't do, he will be unchanged in the morning and she will continue, lost and seeking, as before. And the brief moments in the storeroom earlier showed her how powerful their embrace can be.
She slips her hand down over his chest, relishing crisp cotton beneath the waistcoat.
Red sits up suddenly and tears the waistcoat off. He shimmies and kick away his left shoe and sock, then his right.
Glancing at her, he takes hold of her left ankle, and works her shoe free. Same again for the right.
The evening air strikes her toes. It is warm and soft. Red's fingers are deft on the silk bow at her throat, unknotting.
She laughs, and tugs at him to throw him off balance. They topple sideways and roll on the deck giggling, he kissing her chin, her neck, her collarbone and reaching always for her mouth - she revelling in his body half over hers and the certainty that he longs for her as much as she has always thought.
Although she is sore from months of ducking punches and dodging bullets, although the wooden deck is unforgiving, Lizzie makes no attempt to move. The moonlight is dropping on them great slices of silver and snow, and Red is holding her with urgency mixed with a wonderful reverence. He has still said nothing.
Has she finally found a way to silence him?
Red, speechless, would only be fun for a little while.
She shifts so they are side by side, watching each other's eyes, hands still engaged in exploration.
"You are beautiful," he says at last. He speaks flatly as he often does to her: his way of signalling a blunt truth among all the misdirection.
She trails her fingertips over his cheek. "You are too."
"I'm monstrous."
"I'm talking about your looks. I know who you are."
He seems wistful then, and this is not the time. So she adds, "This can't last. We should make the most of it."
"There's only ever one first time," he agrees. He is propped on his right elbow. His left hand begins to slip her blouse off her shoulder. "I must say, the moonlight is a wonderful touch. Inspired."
She shivers as his mouth touches her skin. "Can you feel it," she asks, letting her head drop back to the floor.
"The moonlight. Yes."
"It's - I'm -" It is power.
"Ancient energy multiplied by a thousand new stars drifting in our orbit. Space junk magnifying moonlight, recharging devices we barely understand, acting upon us, those of us from elsewhere, making us more than we ever used to be."
There are more of them, then, more other-worlders. She hears this, and stores it in the back of her mind. For now she allows him to part her blouse and kiss and caress from throat to belly.
Then be hauls himself back up to eye level and kisses her briefly and says in something like his usual weary tone. "Lizzie. You're certain about this."
She looks at him, his decency near smothered beneath the deeds arising from a thousand evil decisions, a thousand terrible steps along a road away from his first impulses. She must look in the face his ghastly deeds, as well as his dedication to protecting her. And oddly this calm acknowledgement of his split nature makes her reply easy. "I'm certain. I know you won't - hurt me."
"Never," he says, and kisses her with great tenderness. "Now. Since that's cleared up-"
In the wrestling match that follows, blouse and shirt fly onto the floor, and are ruffled by the wind, their tiny noises quite drowned out by moonlight and laughter.