“The less you know, the better.”

“There were a few things we should have known yesterday,” Marty says.

Cole’s face displays none of the jaw-tensing arrogance he showed them on the boat dock.

“I didn’t come to justify my decision,” he says. “I fucked up. I failed you. All of you.”

She’s so startled by this admission she’s not sure what to say. Neither, it seems, is Marty.

For a while, no one says anything.

Cole gets to his feet, crosses slowly toward Luke’s hospital bed. His eyes are focused on something, but she can’t tell what exactly. Then, when he reaches the bed, Cole reaches out and runs his fingers along the bandages on Luke’s right wrist.

“Rope?” he asks.

“Flex-cuffs,” she answers. “Plastic, I think.” She leaves out the part about how they had started to melt into his skin by the time she got there. The bandages say that for her.

“Rope is bad,” he says quietly.

Marty straightens in his chair like a cat hearing a strange sound.

She waits for Cole to explain this strange statement further, but he doesn’t. Is he drunk? He doesn’t smell like booze. Just sweat and dirt. And smoke, a scent that takes her back to the limekiln with a sudden speed that makes her head spin a little.

“They were going to kill him,” Cole says. “You know that, right?”

“I figured there was a pretty good chance . . . yeah.”

“It’s not a guess. I saw what they were using. You don’t use that to scare someone into being quiet. You use it to extract information before you get rid of them. They weren’t going to return him to his normal life covered in third-degree burns.”

“How much else did you see?” she asks. “During the cleanup, I mean.”

He looks into her eyes for the first time since she woke up. “Everything,” he says. “Nice work, even if it was technically unsanctioned.”

She’s so unprepared for this, so surprised Cole hasn’t blown in and tried to take her to task for everything, she’s not sure what to say. For Christ’s sake, he hasn’t even asked her where she got the pills. Maybe he already knows.

Across the room, Marty seems equally surprised, but not satisfied. When it comes to Cole, Marty will never be entirely satisfied. And maybe she shouldn’t be, either.

“I’d like you to stay here for a bit,” Cole says. “There was another guy. Their driver, apparently. He ran, but we just caught up with him in Morro Bay. He was trying to get rid of their van. But let me make sure we’ve covered everything before you and Luke go home. We have real security here now. New people, good people. People who trust me and believe in what I’m doing. What we’re doing. But just stay for now, please. I’d hate to make the same mistake twice.”

Now she’s the focus of Marty’s intense stare. Either he’s pissed that Cole’s passing the buck down onto the people who work for him, or he’s waiting for her to make the same proclamation she made to him that morning. To ditch Altamira, as he put it. To hand herself over to Cole’s constant custody.

She doesn’t. The urge is gone. The need to run is gone. Maybe Marty’s lecture did the trick, or maybe it was the need in Luke’s eyes when he woke. But there are moments, she realizes, when her past will make her feel like she doesn’t deserve attachments and the messy complexities of love. Everyone deserves them. Everyone. But when you cut yourself free of the possibility, you forget.

“Jordy Clements?” she asks, remembering the howling man, broken in more ways than one, she’d left in the dirt beside the storage shed.

“The less you know, the better,” he says. “About this part anyway. Besides, as we agreed last night, it’s the least I can do.”

There’s a sudden quickness to his step. She’s pretty sure he’s about to leave, so she calls out to him. Startled, he turns. Maybe he was trying to make this quick because he thought she’d never want to lay eyes on him again.

A few hours ago, that was the case. But her only thought now is that she’s never seen this version of Cole Graydon before, and it’s too erratic and off-balance to be a put-up job.

“What did you mean, rope is bad?” she asks.

His stare seems blank, but it’s also steady. Steady in a way that makes her unsure if he’s distracted or just stalling.

He looks at Luke again, at the little carpet of bandages on his naked back. Cole’s silences have surged with all sorts of thinly repressed emotions, but never this kind of sudden acute pain.

Like her, Marty’s frozen in anticipation of whatever Cole might say next.

“When I was thirteen, my father sent me to this wilderness adventure camp in Colorado. The goal was to toughen up rich kids like me. I hated it. Every minute of it. I bitched and moaned and whined like a spoiled brat. Because I was a spoiled brat. And at the time, I had no desire to be anything else. We hiked five or six miles every day. At night, we camped with these plastic tarps that would barely do anything if it rained. We didn’t even have tents.

“But even as I hated it, there were beautiful things. I remember one day before dawn we hiked to the top of a mountain so we could watch the sunrise from several thousand feet. There were animals that came so close it was like we were . . . I don’t know. Siblings.