“You didn’t stop until the one you loved was OK, and you stopped the people who tried to stop you. You just did it with a tool nobody else has got. That’s all. That’s the only difference, Charley. And if Luke can’t see that, he doesn’t deserve you.”

She’s not sure if she can’t argue with him because deep down she believes he’s right or because she’s just too damn tired.

After a while, her head meets his shoulder, then she loses her sense of time and slips into that shallow sleep where you’re not sure what’s real or what’s a dream. Maybe the low murmur of Marty talking to the doctors and nurses is real, but sometimes it sounds like their words are quiet, whispered versions of the vicious things she said to Jordy Clements. Then the sunlight on the other side of her eyelids feels brighter, and she figures day is breaking fully outside. Someone pulls the window shade above her, but it sounds kind of like the winch on that horrible torture device did when she turned it. Is she lying flat on the bench now? Is someone—Marty? A nurse?—bringing a blanket up over her?

Then there’s a loud crash, and when she jerks awake, she sees Marty standing a few feet away, staring through the doorway into Luke’s room.

“Howdy, podnah. How’d you sleep?” There’s no answer, but she’s got no doubt who he’s talking to.

She swings her legs to the floor, shoves the blanket aside.

Marty enters before her, which means he’s blocking her view of Luke and Luke’s view of her.

Then he crosses around the foot of the bed, and she sees what made the crash. When Luke started awake, he pushed his chest-support pillow off the bed and it knocked into a supply table next to the bed as it fell.

Luke looks dazed, disoriented, and frustrated.

“What was that thing?” he asks in a voice still scratchy from smoke.

“It was supposed to keep you up off your back,” Marty says. “Got some burns there, son.”

“I couldn’t breathe,” he says.

“Well, that’s fine. You can breathe now, right?”

Marty’s looking back and forth between her and Luke, probably waiting, just as she is, for the dreaded moment she described earlier.

Charlotte’s heart feels like it’s hammering faster than it does when she’s triggered. And she can’t bring herself to step entirely inside the room yet, so her hand’s gripping the doorframe next to her.

Then Luke sees her. His mouth goes slack and his eyes widen. Her heart drops. It looks like the sight of her makes him numb. For a second, she thinks it might be possible he really doesn’t remember her, that he suffered some terrible head injury before she got to him.

“Charley . . .”

He says it the way he said it inside the limekiln. Soft, but also distant and confused.

“Charley.”

Is it tears or smoke damage choking his voice? In this moment, does it matter? He’s reaching out for her, for real this time. She starts for him and when their fingers finally touch, he pulls her to him quick and forcefully. She’s about to throw her arms around him, but then she remembers the bandages covering his injured back. So she cradles his head in her hands instead as he embraces her as hard as he can.

“You saved me, Charley,” he says into the fabric of her shirt.

And that’s when she starts crying harder than she ever has in her life.

This time when she wakes, it’s dark again, and she has the feeling she’s being watched.

Earlier, around dusk, the nurses saw her trying to sleep beside Luke in the narrow wedge of bed left over after he rolled onto his stomach. They took pity on her and brought in another hospital bed they put right beside his. Around that time, Luke complained of more pain, so they hit him with another dose of painkillers. That’s probably why he doesn’t even stir as she sits up in bed now.

There’s a shadow close to the open door, sitting in a chair that wasn’t there before.

Marty senses it, too; he starts awake in his chair, his snore turning into a hacking attempt to clear his throat.

The smell coming from their visitor combines body odor with dirt and green things. She hits the light switch on her bed. Cole’s sitting just far enough away for it to send a soft glow over him. But she can tell he’s wearing the same clothes he had on the day before, and the product that usually styles his hair into a side part has lost its hold. The scratches on his cheeks look like they were left by small branches. His slacks are dirty and his expensive-looking dress shirt dirt smudged. He didn’t just supervise the cleanup effort. It looks like he actually took part in it with his own two hands. No doubt he wants her to see this, and that’s why he hasn’t showered or changed.

But there’s a feeling more severe than exhaustion in his look of glaze-eyed shock. He’s seen the bloody evidence of everything she’d left up there. Not just seen it. For Christ’s sake, it looks like he touched it.

Nobody says anything for a while. When she glances at Marty, she sees his expression is a tense mask that betrays traces of anger, but he seems just as startled by Cole’s appearance as she is.

“How is he?” Cole asks.

She glances down at Luke to see if he’s still asleep; he is. “Resting.”

“Good.”

“How did it go?” she asks. Cole looks at her, confused. “The cleanup,” she says.