Tenth.  Bruises.

A grouping of purple-gray finger-marks around his wrist, like a cluster of overripe grapes.  She comes, and she goes, and this is what she leaves him: marks beneath the skin.

He thinks of them in clinical terms, obtuse and pleasantly dry.  Ecchymoses.  Hematoma.  Ignores the plan-sense meaning, the one in his head.  Bruises.  Deep.

"How did they happen?" they ask.  They peruse the photographs, enlarged, documenting every mark on his skin.  No matter that the injury is minor, they will horde any information they have. 

"I tried to duck out of her way before she had the chance to strike.  She saw what I was doing and grabbed my wrist."

"And what did she do then?"

"Nothing.  I twisted away and was able to leave."

They nod their heads, make their little marks.  He acted properly, they will say.  He eluded capture.

He wishes he had gotten off so easily. 

The feeling follows him at night, the pressure of a cold hand on his wrist, grimy and dark, clipped nails digging into his skin. 

When he found her, she was bent over the balcony railing, the material of her silk shirt sticking to her back in the heat.  Frozen still, she refused to see him in the dark, kept her back to him, muscles taut and stiff.  He turned on every lamp in the room behind her, light falling on his briefcase, her half-packed bags, the half-spent book of matches on the table behind her, embers still glowing from the just-extinguished flames.  The dull, orange glow lit her like an angel on the road to hell. She was holding one fist over the edge, tilting it slowly, and he waited several seconds more before she turned to him at last. Her smile was painful, her eyes clear, and he watched her fingers loosen as the ashes fell.

He stepped forward, though the sliding door, reaching for her hand, but it was too late.  The last ashes, the last record of where they had been, what they had accomplished, fell like thick smoke through the cool air.  She reached for him, hand cold, smeared black and still grimy with the ashes.  She gripped his wrist as if it were a rappelling rope, as if it would support her, keep her from blowing away. 

"They're gone," she says.  "The photographs. All of them.  There's no record that you've been here at all; you can go back now.  Go back to Sydney."

"You should come."  The words leave his mouth, expressionless, flat.  He does not know whether he means them.

She shakes her head, eyes still clear, smile still sad.  "No.  I've paid my price.  Sydney will never accept me for who I am.  But she will accept you, so long as you're not with me."

His jaw tightens; his lips press thin.  "That's your choice?"

"Take care of her, Jack."  The clear tears spill out of her eyes, trace down her face, and they wet his cheeks when he kisses her.  She smells of salt and sweat and smoke, and her lips and her skin are as soft as they have always been.  This will be the picture he carries with him; the one photograph he can safely keep: the image seared into his memory.

When he steps back, she smiles, releasing her grip on his wrist.  "I always loved you."

He nods, curtly, the best response he can manage.  "The CIA is no longer surveilling me.  When Sydney changes her mind, you should initiate contact."

She smiles, brightly this time, knowing what his words mean, understanding the things he cannot bring himself to tell her. 

Eleventh.  Memories and promise.

She told him once: she carried a picture in her head for twenty years, of a loving husband, a generous man, a patriot.  He carries a similar picture now, weathered and darkened with time.  Of a loving mother, a beautiful wife, a choice.  Fine creases cross the surface, like the tiny lines around her eyes, and his.  Dark smudges blur the surface: betrayals, bruises, games.  But behind the black smudges she smiles at him, eyes bright, she reminds him of a promise she made one night on a balcony.  That she had loved him; that she would continue to do so. 

He carries its inverse, too, in his mind: that he loved her then, that he has never been able to stop doing so.  Behind the dark lists, the catalogues of things she has done to him, of injuries he's inflicted in return, he remembers this image.  He burned her old photographs, after Laura died, and she burned their new ones, one night on a balcony.   So he holds this picture in his head, with its sounds, its senses, its impressions.  They are the mark she leaves on him, the reminder of his promise to her, unspoken, but understood. 

He will never be able to let her go.