“I think I’m going to let them put me up somewhere.”

“Like a hotel?” he asks.

“No, longer than that. Like . . .”

“Like what?”

“I just don’t think I can stay here, Marty.”

“What, the ranch?”

“Altamira,” she answers.

He just stares at her for a while. Biting his tongue, she realizes.

“Why not?” he finally asks.

“It’s not safe.”

“What are you saying? Where are you going to stay if you don’t stay here?”

“Someplace they can . . . I don’t know. Do a better job of taking care of me.”

“Their labs? You’re just going to go live in their labs?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going to become their prisoner? That’s your response?”

“How do you think I should respond?”

“I don’t know, but not like it’s your fault.”

“It’s not?”

“You didn’t bring those psychos here.”

“I didn’t? Cole brought them here, and I brought Cole here.”

“Cole followed you here!” Marty shouts. “That’s different.”

“Marty, lower your voice.”

“I will not!” Marty shoots to his feet, looks to the ceiling over his head as if he’s searching for hidden microphones. “I will not lower my voice. I will not let you take the blame for this because some rich asshole’s decided to scare us with hidden cameras and helicopters and for-shit security! This is Cole Graydon’s fault, and I don’t care if he or his minions hear me say it. It was Cole Graydon who told us on that boat dock yesterday that we were safe like no one else.

“He didn’t say, Sit tight but stay sharp, I’ve got good people coming. In the morning! He said we were safer here than we were anywhere. And if he’d said otherwise, I would have been out in front of your house with a gun on my lap and Rucker and Brasher backing me up just like we did when we watched over you before. And we would have caught those sick sons of bitches when they were moving in, not when they were moving out!”

“Marty, please. Just sit.”

“No,” he answers. “I won’t sit and I won’t quiet down, and I don’t care who’s listening in on a hidden microphone or a goddamn toaster oven. This is not your fault, Charley. It’s not your damn fault!”

When no one comes running to put him in restraints and fly him off to an undisclosed location, Marty sucks in a deep breath and flounces down onto the bench next to her. He clasps his hands in front of him, elbows resting on his knees. It looks like he’s chewing on dip, but he quit doing dip years ago. There’s no misinterpreting his pose and his expression; she’s known him too long for that. His outburst didn’t satisfy him, so that means there’s a lecture coming.

“Your grandmother used to tell me that she thought if she’d just feel guilty enough about something she could end it somehow. No matter what it was. If she just shouted to the universe that it was really her fault, the universe would say, OK. Thanks, Luanne. We get the picture. We’ll take it off everybody’s plate now.

“It was driving her crazy, doing this. It was part of why she drank so much. And the thing she kept wrestling with when she first got sober was she really, she really, thought that if she stopped hurting for you and your mother every hour of every day that it was as good as breaking up your bones and throwing them down a hillside. As if they’d never been part of a person.

“Those were her exact words. And do you want to know, when they found you, baby girl, is when she sobered up. When she stopped torturing herself every damn hour. Now, I’m not saying those two things aren’t connected, but what I’m sure as hell saying is that the first two things aren’t. She wasn’t keeping you alive by refusing to live.

“But God help me, you are just like she was, Charley. You take the hit for something you shouldn’t because you think you’re gonna absorb all of it and nobody else will get sprayed. But you can’t. You’re not that powerful even when you’re triggered, and if you keep doing it, all you’re going to be is in more pain than you deserve.”

“Marty . . .”

“You’re in love, Charlotte Rowe. You’re in love for the first time, and under the craziest damn circumstances I can imagine, and this is how it feels. And that’s what you want to run from because when you’re in love with somebody and they get hurt, you hurt just as bad. If you don’t, it’s not love.

“It’s true, darling. Don’t deny it.”

“Marty, he saw me do things. Terrible things.”

“You did them for him.”

“Still, if he wakes up and he looks at me like he doesn’t recognize me because of what I did on that mountain, I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it.”

“If he does that, then he’s the one who should ditch Altamira.”

“I killed people, Marty. I killed them and I didn’t think twice about it.”

“You did what we expect men to do for their women. What we expect parents to do for their children.”

“No, Marty. Not the kind of things I did.”