t had taken two weeks hiking through the jungle to find the kill.

Bugs had alerted them; and the smell of death.

Nina stood beside the guide who had led her here. For a terrible instant, she experienced it all: the flies buzzing in the clearing, the maggots that turned the bloody carcass almost white in places, the stillness of the African jungle that meant predators and scavengers were nearby, watching.

Then she began to compartmentalize the scene, to see it as a photographer. She pulled out her light meter and ran a quick check. When that was done, she chose one of the three cameras hanging from around her neck and focused on the ruined, bloodied body of the mountain gorilla.

Click.

She stepped around, kept focusing and snapping shots. Changing cameras, adjusting lenses, checking the light. Her adrenaline kicked in. It was the only time she ever really felt alive, when she was taking pictures. Her eye was her great gift; that and her ability to separate from what was going on around her. You couldn’t have one without the other. To be a great photographer you had to see first and feel later.

She paused long enough to put a little more Vicks under her nose and then squatted down closer to focus on the severed neck. From somewhere, she heard the sound of vomiting; it was probably the young journalist who had accompanied Nina. She could hardly worry about that now.

Click. Click.

The poachers wanted only the head, hands, and feet. The money items. There were places in the world where a gorilla’s hand was an ashtray in some rich asshole’s library.

Click. Click.

For the next hour, Nina framed and shot, changing cameras and lenses as often as she needed to, putting used film into canisters and labeling them before tucking them into her pocketed vest. When dusk finally fell, they began the long, hot, slippery trek back down through the jungle. The air was electric with sounds—bugs, birds, monkeys—and the sky was the color of fresh blood. A tangerine sun played hide-and-seek through the trees. Though they’d all chatted on the way up, the descent was quiet, solemn. The immediate aftermath was always worst for Nina. It was difficult sometimes to forget what she’d seen. Often, in the middle of the night, the images would return as nightmares and waken her from a dead sleep. More often than she liked to admit, she woke with tears on her cheeks.

At the bottom of the mountain, the group came to the small outpost that served as a town in this remote part of Rwanda. There, they climbed into the jeep and drove several hours to the conservation center, where they asked more questions and she took more photos.

“Mrs. Nina?”

She was standing by the center’s door, cleaning a lens, when she heard someone say her name. Putting the camera away, she looked up and saw the center’s head guide beside her. She smiled as brightly as she could, given how tired she was. “Hello, Mr. Dimonsu.”

“I am sorry to bother you when busy things are happening, but we forgot to give you most important phone message. It from Mrs. Sylvie. She say to tell you to call her.”

“Thank you.”

Nina took the bulky satellite phone out of her bag and carried all the gear to a clearing in the center of the camp. A quick compass check identified the satellite’s direction. She unfolded the dish part of the sat phone, set it on the ground, and pointed it at sixty degrees northeast. Then she hooked the phone up to the dish and turned it on. An LCD panel blinked to orange life, giving her the signal strength. When it looked good, she made the call.

“Hey, Sylvie,” she said when her editor answered. “I got the poacher photos today. Sick bastards. Give me, what, ten days to get them to you?”

“You’ve got six days. We’re thinking of the cover.”

The cover. Her two favorite words. Some women liked diamonds; she liked the cover of Time magazine. Or National Geographic. She wasn’t picky. She actually hoped someday to get the cover and about sixteen pages for her photographic essay titled “Women Warriors Around the World.” Her pet project. As soon as she was done—whenever the hell that might be—she’d submit freelance. “You’ll have it. And then I’m meeting Danny in Namibia.”

“Lucky girl. Have sex for me. But be ready to be back to work next Friday. The violence in Sierra Leone is escalating again. The peace talks are going to fall apart. I want you there before Christmas.”

“You know me,” Nina said. “Ready to fly at a moment’s notice.”

“I won’t call unless a new war breaks out. I promise,” Sylvie said. “Now go get laid while I try to remember what it’s like.”

A few days later, Nina was in Namibia, in a rented Land Rover, with Danny at the wheel.

It was only seven in the morning and already the December sun was bright and warm. By one o’clock, the temperature would be somewhere around 115 degrees, and it could well be hotter. The road—if you could call it that—was really a river of thick reddish gray sand that sucked at the car’s tires and sent them careening one way and then the other. Nina held on to the door handle and sat up straight, trying to make her body work like a shock absorber, rolling with the motion.

She used her other hand to steady the camera that hung around her neck so that the strap didn’t bite into her flesh. A T-shirt was wrapped around the camera and lens—not a very professional way to battle dust, but in all her years in Africa, it had proven to be the best compromise between protection and use. Here, sometimes you had only an instant to grab your camera and take the shot. No time to fumble with straps and cases.

She stared out at the desolate, blistering landscape. As the hours passed, taking them farther and farther from any semblance of civilization and deeper into one of the last true wildernesses of southern Africa, she noticed more herds of starving animals standing by dry riverbeds. In this summer heat, they were dropping to their knees, dying where they stood as they waited for the rains to come. Bleaching bones lay everywhere.

“You sure you want to find the Himba?” Danny asked, flashing her a grin as they slammed sideways and almost found themselves stuck in the sand. The dirt on his face made his white teeth and blue eyes look startlingly bright. Dust powdered his collar-length black hair and shirt. “We haven’t had a week to ourselves in months.”

The so-called road became passable again, and she brought up her camera, studying him through the viewfinder. Focusing on him, widening the shot just a little, she saw him as clearly as if he’d been a stranger: a handsome thirty-nine-year-old Irishman with pronounced cheekbones and a nose that had been broken more than once. Pub fights as a lad, he always said, and just now, when he was looking ahead, concentrating on the road, she could see the tiny frown lines around his mouth. He was worried that he’d followed bad advice on the wrong road, though he’d never say such a thing. He was a war correspondent and used to being “in the shit,” as he liked to say, used to following a story to hell and back. Even if it wasn’t his story.

She took the shot.

He flashed her a smile and she took another. “Next time you want to photograph women, I suggest waitresses at a poolside bar.”

She laughed and put the camera in her lap again, covering the lens with its cap. “I owe you one.”

“Indeed you do, love, and I’ll be collecting, you c’n be sure.”

Nina leaned back into the torn, uncomfortable seat and tried not to close her eyes, but she was exhausted. After two weeks tracking poachers through the jungle and four weeks before that in Angola watching people kill each other, she was tired to the bone.

And still, she loved it. There was nowhere in the world she’d rather be and nothing she’d rather be doing. Finding “the shot” was an adrenaline-fueled fun ride, and one she never tired of, no matter what sacrifices she had to make along the way. She’d known that sixteen years ago, when at twenty-one, with a journalism degree under her belt and a used camera in her backpack, she’d gone in search of her destiny.

For a while she’d taken any job that required a photographer, but in 1985 she’d gotten her big break. At Live Aid, the concert for famine relief, she’d met Sylvie Porter, then a newbie editor at Time, and Sylvie introduced Nina to a different world. The next thing Nina knew, she was on her way to Ethiopia. What she saw there changed everything.

Almost immediately her pictures stopped being only images and began to tell stories. In 1989, when Typhoon Gay smashed into Thailand, leaving more than one hundred thousand people homeless, it was Nina’s photograph of a single woman, up to her chest in dirty water, carrying her crying baby above her head, that graced the cover of Time magazine. Two years ago, she’d won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the famine in Sudan.

Not that it came easily, this career of hers.

Like the Himba tribe of this region, she’d had to become a nomad. Soft mattresses and clean sheets and running water were luxuries she’d learned to live without.

“Look. There,” Danny said, pointing.

At first all she saw was an orange and red sky, full of dust. The world felt scorched and smelled of smoke. Gradually, the silhouettes on the ridge materialized into thin people, standing tall, gazing down at the dirty Land Rover and its even dirtier occupants.

“That them?” he asked. “Must be.”

Nodding, he closed the last distance between them and the ridge, and at the bend in a dry riverbed he parked the vehicle and got out.

The Himba tribe stood back, watching.

Danny walked slowly forward, knowing the chief would present himself. Nina followed his lead.

At the elder’s hut, they paused. The sacred fire burned in front of it, sending a stream of smoke into the now-purple sky. They both bent down, moved carefully, making sure not to pass in front of the fire. That would be seen as disrespectful.

The chief approached them and, in halting Swahili, Nina sought permission to take pictures, while Danny showed the tribe the fifteen gallons of water he had brought as a gift. For a people that walked miles for a handful of water, it was an overwhelming gift, and suddenly Nina and Danny were welcomed like old friends. Children surged at them, surrounded Nina in a giggling, jumping pack. The Himbas swept her and Danny into the village, where they were fed a traditional meal of maize porridge and sour milk and were entertained by the tribe. Later, when the night was blue with moonlight, they were led to a rounded mud hut, called a rondoval, where they lay together on a mat of woven grass and leaves. The air smelled sweet, of roasted corn and dry earth.

Nina rolled onto her side to face Danny. In the shadowy blue light, his face looked young, although, like her, he had old eyes. It was a hazard of the trade. They’d seen too many terrible things. But it was what had brought them together. What they had in common. The yearning to see everything, no matter how terrible, to know everything.

They’d met in an abandoned hut in the Congo, during the first war, both of them taking cover from the worst of the fighting; she to reload her camera, him to bandage a wound in his shoulder.

That looks bad, she’d said. Can I wrap it for you?

He’d looked up at her. All that prayin’ must have worked. God has sent me my own angel.

From then on, they’d been together all over the world. In the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Congo, Rwanda, Nepal, Bosnia. They’d both become specialists on Africa, but wherever the big news was happening, they were likely to be there. Both had London apartments that did little more than collect junk mail, messages, and dust. Often their interests took them to separate hot spots—him to civil wars, her to humanitarian tragedies—and they spent months without seeing each other, which was just fine with Nina. It only made the sex better.

“I’m going to be forty next month,” he said quietly.

She loved his accent. The simplest sentence sounded edgy and sexy when he said it. Ah’m goin’ t’ be farhty next moonth.

“Don’t worry, twenty-five-year-olds still swoon when they see you. It’s the I-used-to-be-in-a-rock-band look of you.”

“It was a punk rock band, love.”

She snuggled closer to him, kissed his neck while her hand slid down his bare chest. His body responded as quickly as she expected, and within moments he had her undressed and they were doing what they’d always done best.

Afterward, Danny pulled her close. “How come we can talk about anything but us?”

“Who was talking about us?”

“I said I was almost forty.”

“And I’m supposed to see that as a conversation starter? I’m thirty-seven.”

“What if I miss you when you’re gone?”

“You know who I am, Danny. I told you at the very beginning.”

“That was more than four years ago, for God’s sake. Everything in the world changes except you, I guess.”

“Exactly.” She rolled over, spooning her body against his. She’d always felt safe in his arms, even when gunfire was exploding all around them and the night was full of screaming. Tonight, though, there was only the sound of a fire crackling outside, and of bugs buzzing and chirping in the dark.

She moved the tiniest bit away from him, but his arms closed around her, held her in place.

“I didn’t ask for anything,” he whispered into her ear.

You did, she thought, closing her eyes. An unfamiliar anxiety settled in the pit of her stomach. You just don’t know it yet.

On a ridge high above the makeshift village, Nina squatted on the crumbling edge of a riverbed. Her thighs burned from the effort it took to remain motionless. It was six in the morning, and the sky was a gorgeous blend of aqua and orange; already the sun was gaining strength.

Below her, a Himba woman walked through the village with a heavy pot balanced on her head and a baby positioned in a colorful sling at her breast. Nina raised the camera to her eye and zoomed in the telephoto lens until she could see perfectly. Like all the women of this nomadic African tribe, the young woman was bare-breasted and wore a furry goatskin skirt. A large conch-shell necklace—handed down from mother to daughter through the generations, a valued possession—showed the world that she was married, as did the style of her hair. Covered from head to toe in red ochre dust and butterfat to protect her skin from the terrorizing sun, the young mother’s skin was the color of old bricks. Her ankles, considered her most private part, were hidden beneath a row of thin metal bands that made a tinkling sound when she walked.

Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in women all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child’s future. There was nowhere to go to find water.

Nina caught it on film and kept shooting until the woman walked on, went back to her rounded mud hut and sat down in a circle of other women. Together, talking, the women began crushing red ochre on flat rocks, collecting the sandy residue in calabash bowls.

Nina covered the lens and stood up, stretching her aching joints. She’d taken hundreds of pictures this morning, but she didn’t need to look through them to know that The One was of the woman at the riverbank.

In her mind, she cropped, framed, printed, and hung the image among the great ones she’d collected. Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength.

She unloaded the film, labeled the canister, tucked it away and reloaded, then walked through the village, smiling at people, handing out the candies and ribbons and bracelets she always carried. She took another great picture of four Himba women emerging from the smoke-and-herb sauna that was their method of keeping clean in a land devoid of water. In the picture, the women were holding hands and laughing. It was an image that captured a universal feminine connection.

She heard Danny come up beside her. “Hey, you.”

She leaned against him, feeling good about her shots. “I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we’ve seen?”

“So it’s mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors.”

Nina frowned. She’d never thought of it that way, and the observation was unsettling. “Not always mothers. Women fighting for something. Triumphing over impossible odds.”

He smiled. “So you are a romantic after all.”

She laughed. “Right.”

“You ready to go?”

“I think I got what I needed, yeah.”

“Does this mean we can go lie by a pool for a week?”

“There’s nothing I’d rather do.” She put her camera equipment away and repacked their gear while Danny spoke to the village elder and thanked him for the pictures. She set up her satellite phone on the desert floor, unfolding the silver wings and positioning it until she found a signal.

As she expected, the magazine offices were closed, so she left a message for her editor and promised to call from the Chobe River Lodge in Zambia. Then she and Danny climbed back into the busted-up old Land Rover, drove through the lunar landscape of Kaokoveld, and hopped on a plane headed south. By nightfall, they were at the Chobe River Lodge, on their own private deck, watching the sun set over a herd of elephants on the opposite shore. They were being served gin and tonics while a hundred yards away lions were hunting in the tall grass.

In a bikini that had seen better days, Nina stretched out on the luxurious two-person lounge chair and closed her eyes. The night smelled of murky water and dry grass and mud baked to stone by the unforgiving sun. For the first time in weeks, her pixie-cut black hair was clean and there was no red dirt under her fingernails. Pure luxury.

She heard Danny coming through their room toward the deck. He took an almost imperceptible pause before each step, a tiny favoring of the right leg, which had taken a bullet in Angola. He pretended it didn’t bother him, told people there was no pain, but Nina knew about the pills he swallowed and the way he sometimes couldn’t find a comfortable position in which to sleep. When she massaged his body, she put extra effort into that leg, although he didn’t ask her to, and she didn’t admit that she’d done it.

“Here you go,” he said, putting two glasses onto the teak table beside her.

She tilted her face up to thank him and noticed several things at once: he hadn’t brought a gin and tonic. Instead, he’d put down a straight shot so big it was practically a tumblerful of tequila. He’d forgotten the salt, and worst of all, he wasn’t smiling.

She sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe you should take a drink first.”

When an Irishman told you to take a drink first, there was bad news coming.

He sat down beside her on the lounger. She eased sideways to make room for him.

The stars were out now, and in the pale silvery glow she could see his sharp features and hollow cheeks, his blue eyes and curly hair. She realized in that moment, when he looked so sad, how much he laughed and smiled, even when the sun was broiling or the dust was choking or the gunshots were exploding in the air. He could always smile.

Except now he wasn’t.

He handed her a smallish yellow envelope. “Telegram.”

“Did you read it?”

“Course not. But it can’t be good news, now, can it?”

Journalists and producers and photojournalists the world over knew about telegrams. It was how your family delivered bad news, even in this satellite phone and Internet age. Her hands were unsteady as she reached for the envelope. Her first thought was, Thank God, when she saw that it had come from Sylvie, but that relief died as she read on.

NINA.

YOUR FATHER HAS HAD A HEART ATTACK.

MEREDITH SAYS IT LOOKS BAD.

SYLVIE.

She looked up at Danny. “It’s my dad.... I need to go now—”

“Impossible, love,” he said gently. “The first flight out of here is at six. I’ll get us tickets to Seattle from Johannesburg. Is it best to drive from there?”

“Us?”

“Aye. I want to be there for you, Nina. Is that so terrible?”

She didn’t know how to respond to that, what to say. Relying on people for comfort had never felt natural to her. The last thing she wanted was to give someone the power to hurt her. Self-preservation was the one thing she’d learned from her mother. So she did what she always did at times like these: she reached down for the buttons on his pants. “Take me to bed, Daniel Flynn. Get me through this night.”

Interminable was the word that came to mind to describe the wait, but that only made Meredith think terminal, which made her think death, which brought up all the emotions she was trying to suppress. Her usual coping mechanism—keeping busy—wasn’t working for her now, and she’d tried. She’d buried herself in insurance information, researched heart attacks and survival, and come up with a list of the best cardiologists in the country. The second she put her pen down or looked away from the screen, her grief came rushing back. Tears were a constant pressure behind her eyes. So far, though, she’d kept them from falling. Crying would be its own defeat and she refused to give up.

She crossed her arms tightly, staring at the multicolored fish in the waiting room tank. Sometimes, if she was lucky, one of them actually caught her attention and for a nanosecond she forgot that her father might be dying.

She felt Jeff come up behind her. Though she hadn’t heard footsteps on the carpet, she knew he was there. “Mere,” he said quietly, putting his hands on her shoulders. She knew what he wanted: for her to lean back into him, to let herself be held. There was a part of her that wanted it, too, longed for that comfort, in fact, but the larger part of her—the part that was hanging on to hope one breath at a time—didn’t dare soften. In his arms, she might fall apart, and what good would that do?

“Let me hold you,” he said into her ear.

She shook her head. How was it he didn’t understand?

She worried about her father in a way that consumed her. It felt as if a knife had plunged deep in her chest, tearing past bone and muscle; the sharp point lay poised at her heart. One wrong move and the tender organ would be punctured.

Behind her, she heard him sigh. He let go. “Did you get hold of your sister?”

“I left messages everywhere I could. You know Nina. She’ll be here when she’s here.” She looked at the clock again. “What is taking that damn doctor so long? He should be giving us a report. In ten minutes I’m calling the head of the department.”

Jeff started to say something (honestly she was barely listening; her heart was beating so fast she couldn’t hear much above it), but before he was finished, the door to the waiting room opened, and Dr. Watanabe appeared. In an instant, Meredith, Jeff, and Mom came together, walked to the doctor.

“How is he?” her mother asked in a voice that carried throughout the room. How could she possibly sound so strong at a time like this? Only the heaviness of her accent showed that she was upset. Otherwise, she looked as calm as ever.

Dr. Watanabe smiled briefly, barely, and said, “Not good. He had a second heart attack when we were taking him to surgery. We were able to resuscitate him, but he’s very weak.”

“What can you do?” Meredith asked.

“Do?” Dr. Watanable said, frowning. The compassion in his eyes was terrible. “Nothing. The damage to his heart is too extensive. Now we just wait... and hope he makes it through the night.”

Jeff slipped his arm around Meredith’s waist.

“You can see him if you’d like. He’s in the cardiac care unit. But one at a time, okay?” Dr. Watanabe said, taking Mom by the elbow.

Details, Meredith thought, watching her mother walk down the hallway. Focus on the details. Find a way to fix this.

But she couldn’t do it.

Memories gathered at the periphery of her vision, waiting to be invited near. She saw her dad in the stands at her high school gymnastic meets, cheering with embarrassing vigor, and at her wedding, weeping openly as he walked her down the aisle. Only last week he’d taken her aside and said, “Let’s go get a couple of beers, Meredoodle, just the two of us, like we used to.”

And she’d blown him off, told him they’d do it soon....

Had it really been so important to drop off the dry cleaning?

“I guess we should call the girls,” Jeff said. “Fly them home.”

On that, Meredith felt something inside her break, and although she knew it was irrational, she hated Jeff for saying it. He’d given up already.

“Mere?” He pulled her into his arms and held her. “I love you,” he whispered.

She stayed in his arms as long as she could bear and then eased away. Saying nothing, not even looking at him, she followed the path her mother had walked, feeling utterly, dangerously alone in the austere, busy CCU. People in blue scrubs moved in and out of her field of vision, but she had eyes only for her father.

He lay in a narrow bed, surrounded by tubes and IV lines and machines. Beside him, her mother stood vigil. Even now, as her husband lay connected to life by the most tenuous strands, she looked strangely, almost defiantly, serene. Her posture was perfect and if there was a shaking in her hands it would take a seismologist to detect it.

Meredith wiped her eyes, unaware until that moment that tears were seeping out. She stood there as long as she could. The doc had said one at a time and Meredith wasn’t one to break rules, but finally she couldn’t stand it. She went to him, stopped at the foot of his bed. The whir of machinery seemed absurdly loud. “How is he?”

Her mother sighed heavily and walked away. Meredith knew her mom would head straight for a window somewhere and stare out into the snowy night, alone.

Normally, it pissed Meredith off, how alone her mother liked to be, but just now she didn’t care, and for once, she didn’t judge her mother harshly. Everyone broke—and held themselves together—in their own way.

She reached down and touched her father’s hand. “Hey, Daddy,” she whispered, trying her best to smile. “It’s your Meredoodle. I’m here, and I love you. Talk to me, Daddy.”

The only answer was the wind, tapping on the glass while the snow flurried and danced beneath the outside light.