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Sayid shifted against the earth and felt his bonds cut into his flesh. Ana-Lucia's question still unsettled him, but he knew she had not seen into his past or suspected the remnants of some old scar. She, he thought, was contemplating whom she might orphan. And if she had children herself, perhaps she was considering how her actions might shame them. He echoed her question: "Do you have children?"

And she too answered with the truth: "No."

"Are you going to kill me?" he asked. Better to be pointed. She did not seem the subtle type. "That's what you're thinking about, isn't it?"

"Should I?"

Should she? Of course she only meant, Will you kill me if I do not kill you first? But Sayid saw his hand on Hala's stomach, and he heard his broken promise—broken not once, not twice, but dozens of times…broken even here, on this very island.

"Almost forty days ago," he confessed, "I tied a man to a tree and tortured him. I tortured him as I've tortured many men...men whose voices I still hear in the night. Should you kill me? Maybe you should. Maybe you were meant to."

He was not seeking absolution; he was seeking a different kind of release, the release that only death can bring. He did not know what she was seeking as she made her own confession of reacting too slowly, of letting a man reach when she should have made him drop.

"What happened to him?" Sayid asked. "The man who shot you?" When she hesitated to answer, he grew nervous. "What happened to him?"

"Nothing," she replied hastily. "They never found him."

And then she came to him with the blade, and the guttural fear surpassed the cyclical guilt, and in that instant he did not want to die.

She cut him free. Instinctively he rose and looked at the gun. "Go ahead," she said. "Pick it up. I deserve it."

And she did, he thought, for killing the woman who had brought him hope, the woman who should have marked a fresh start to a new life, a life that no longer seemed possible. Ana deserved to die. But he deserved to die, too, didn't he? Even here, he hadn't been able to break free from his past. And he hadn't been able to defend the one thing that might have helped him to break free. He had thrown away his second chance.

"What good would it be to kill you," he asked, "if we're both already dead?"

Sayid walked away from the silent shell of a woman, and he bent to the mud-soaked earth, from which he lifted Shannon's lifeless body.

He had not held Hala when she died; he had not carried her body home; he had not even stood beside her grave when she was buried. Sayid had been a hundred miles from Tikrit when he heard the news that his wife and unborn child had been killed by a suicide bomber. The target had been a representative of Sadaam's regime. The terrorist had misjudged the extent of the blast, or he had not cared. Hala had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sayid could not obtain permission to return to Tikrit until two weeks after her death.

Hala had been part of his life for barely a year, and he had tried to suppress the pain by suppressing the memory. He had rolled it under the cover of more than a decade of time…Shannon had been but a little girl when Hala had died. More haunting memories had arisen to eclipse the thought of his wife and unborn child—memories of what he had become, of what he had done, and of the childhood friend who had revealed him to himself.

And now this memory, as fresh as the blood on his shirt. He grasped Shannon tightly to his chest and began his solitary walk to the shore.

The End