lyssa nearly jumped through the roof when Max knocked on the side window of her car.

“Where did you come from?” she asked as she popped the lock and let him in. She honestly hadn’t seen him approach. And she’d been watching.

Her heart was still racing as he sat down next to her and closed the door. She’d thought when he’d first knocked that he was Sam. No such luck.

“I just walked up,” Max told her.

“Like hell you did.”

“You must’ve been sleeping.”

“Like hell I was.”

He smiled at her. “Then I must still be wicked awesome good even though I haven’t been in the field in years.”

Alyssa smiled back at him. “Allegedly haven’t been in the field in years. I work with you, remember? Your interpretation of sitting behind a desk is questionable.”

Max laughed.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Despite his laughter—which faded far too quickly—he looked like hell. He looked tired and... haunted. She hadn’t seen him looking this bad since just after the takedown of that hijacked plane in Kazbekistan.

It was no coincidence, considering...

“I took a chopper up from Sarasota,” he told her. “I wanted to get an update.”

Alyssa held up her cell phone. “Check out this amazing new technology, boss. It allows you to get that update from the comfort of your hotel room. Right before you fall into bed, unconscious.”

“I’ve been having a little trouble sleeping lately,” he admitted.

“Lately?” She gave him a look. “Try the last two years.” Since Kazbekistan.

He sighed.

Were he anyone else, Alyssa would have reached for his hand. But this was Max and there was no touching allowed. “How can I help you?” she asked as gently as she could.

“Well,” he said. “Funny you should ask.”

Her cell phone rang, and she quickly glanced at the number.

“That important?” Max asked.

It was Sam. “No,” she said. It was half a lie. It wasn’t important to the case, just important to her. But, “It can wait.”

Sam wasn’t going anywhere tonight. And she wasn’t either. He hadn’t answered when she’d called him back, and now it was his turn to wonder what she was doing. She switched the ringer over to vibrate, and when she looked up at Max, he was watching her intently.

He looked so serious. “This is going to sound a little crazy, so don’t answer right away. Just think about it, okay?”

Alyssa nodded, suddenly uncertain. Was this something about work or—

He reached over and took her hand, lacing their fingers together. But that wasn’t the biggest surprise.

“I was thinking about that night that we, um, very nearly made love,” he said quietly, “and it occurred to me that I really haven’t slept since then, and, uh, I think you should marry me.”

Alyssa sat there, completely speechless. Completely unable to move, unable even to think.

She cleared her throat. “Max—”

“I love you,” he said. “I’m freaking out at the idea of you and Starrett getting back together. I don’t want to lose you.”

To him. Max didn’t say the words, but they hung there, unspoken. Alyssa’s brain kicked back on and all she could picture was Max, crying in a playground sandbox, because some other kid had stolen his favorite toy truck. Add that on top of the fact that she knew she wasn’t the main reason Max was freaking out, as he so accurately put it.

She looked down at their hands, looked back up at Max. “And?” she prompted him.

He shook his head, not understanding. Or at least pretending not to understand. He was, after all, Max.

“When Jules called,” she told him gently, extracting her hand from his, “he mentioned that Gina came into the office tonight.”

Max closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead. “Ah, crap.”

“This is about you running from her, Max. Not about you really wanting to marry me.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, but he sounded exhausted. Almost defeated. “Seeing Gina was a major motivator, yes, but... Alyssa, we’d be so good together and you know it.”

She’d put her cell phone between her legs, and it vibrated. Sam. Calling back.

“Our lives would run like a precision automobile,” Max told her.

Alyssa laughed. “That’s supposed to make me want to marry you? We’d bore each other to tears.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, and he kissed her.

Unlike his approach to the car, she saw it coming. He leaned across the parking brake and gently cupped her cheek, drawing her mouth to his. And oh, Max could kiss. He could suck her breath right out of her lungs and...

She pulled away, angry at him and angry at herself for momentarily considering that precision automobile thing. Max didn’t love her. He said he did but he didn’t love her. “You’re in love with Gina. You told me you were.”

“That’s not love,” he countered. “That’s something else, something possessive, something, Christ, I don’t know, greedy and twisted and obsessive and chaotic and... I want to own her, Alyssa. I want to wrap her up and keep her safe and put her in... in... some closet somewhere and take her out when it’s convenient for me to... to... Okay. Yes. Sex. It’s about sex and it’s about power and control and it’s about her looking at me with those Bambi eyes and adoring me when she should goddamn hate me, and... that’s not love.”

He pulled her closer to him, so that their faces were mere inches apart. Alyssa could practically smell his desperation.

“Love doesn’t have to eviscerate you,” he told her, using that word on purpose, because she’d used it in the past to describe how she’d felt when Sam ended their relationship. “Love can be something good, something gentle—like what we’ve got.” He kissed her, so sweetly, again and again, punctuating his words. “It can be something that allows us to sleep at night, instead of torturing us and keeping us awake.”

“And you’re just going to forget about Gina?”

He didn’t try to be flip and say, “Gina who?” even as he licked the inside of her mouth.

“I can’t have her,” he said instead. “The same way you know you can’t have Starrett. He’ll rip you to shreds, Alyssa.”

He kissed her again, harder, deeper this time, and God, it would be so easy to just give in. She knew Max. She trusted Max. She even loved him. But she didn’t want her life to run like a precision automobile. She wanted... Chaos.

She wanted to be with someone who burned for her the way Max burned for Gina. If that meant she would be incinerated—or ripped to shreds—so be it. Her phone rang again, and she knew Sam was out there, watching her kissing Max.

She pulled back. “Max—”

“Marry me,” he said, and it wasn’t a question but rather such a possessive demand that she wanted to laugh.

But she didn’t dare. “Marry you,” she repeated instead. “And be forced to leave the team?” Married personnel weren’t allowed to work together. It was true in the military and in the Bureau as well.

“No,” he said. “I’ve figured out a way to get around that. I’ll expand the team. I’ll break it down into four separate groups. I’ll head one, Peggy’ll head one, I’ll bring in Manny Conseco from Sarasota for the third—I really like him—and you’ll head the fourth. With the unspoken understanding that I’ve got ultimate control.”

She was breathless at what he was offering her in terms of her career. He was right. Their lives would be perfect. In every way but one.

She would always know that Max loved Gina. And it was love, despite his argument otherwise. He just had to figure out a way to flip it around and turn it into something more healthy, something more equal. And maybe then it wouldn’t scare the hell out of him quite so much.

But probably not. If Max could get to the place where he’d let her in, Gina was probably going to scare the hell out of him for the entire rest of his life. And he’d sleep far better because of it.

Alyssa opened her mouth to tell him that she couldn’t marry him, that she didn’t want perfection, but he cut her off. In true Max fashion, he’d read her mind.

“Don’t say no,” he said. “Just think about it, all right?”

His phone shrilled. Still holding Alyssa’s gaze, he pulled it out and answered it. “Bhagat.” His lips tightened. “Well, hey, Sam, what a surprise. Ready to turn yourself in?”

There was a longer pause then, and something shifted in Max’s eyes. “Wait,” he said. “Hold on. I want Alyssa to hear this, too.”

He pushed the buttons on his phone that would conference her in, and she opened her own phone when it vibrated. “Locke.”

“Sorry to interrupt.” Sam’s voice was tight. “But I thought I should share this information before you and Max took it into the backseat. You know, that’s some interesting stakeout technique you got there, Max.”

“Just tell her what you told me,” Max ordered. “About your neighbor in San Diego.”

“So I went to the McDonald’s here on base, where Mary Lou worked,” Kelly told Tom without so much as a hello as the guards let her into his temporary prison in the BOQ. “I spoke to the manager on duty, who gave me the phone number of the other managers, too. Everyone agreed that Mary Lou kept to herself while she was at work. She didn’t have any friends among her coworkers, and she apparently spent her breaks reading.”

She kicked off her sandals while she talked, and... Slipped her panties off from under her dress?

“Uh, Kel,” Tom said as she hiked up her skirt and straddled his lap, right there at the table where he’d laid out all of his notes. The door was ajar. The guards couldn’t see in, but they sure as hell could hear every word they said.

“We have only thirty minutes,” she told him, starting to unfasten his pants.

He caught her hands. “Kelly.”

“Wow, that was fast. We’ve only been married a few hours and already you don’t want to have sex with me.”

She was just kidding. Wasn’t she? “The door’s open,” he said, holding her gaze, trying to make it clear with his eyes that if it was only about what he wanted, he’d be inside of her already.

Oh baby, the panties on the floor thing always made him crazy, and she knew it.

Kelly didn’t look away from him as she raised her voice. “Is it going to bother you boys out in the hall if my husband and I have sex on our wedding night?”

There was a pause, then one of the two guards—they couldn’t have been much more than twenty years old—said, “No, ma’am!”

But then the door closed with a definite-sounding click.

“Hey!” that first guard said.

“We can take a few steps down the hall,” the other guard said. “I think it’s safe to say he’s not going anywhere.”

Kelly laughed.

Tom let go of her hands. “See, that’s not SEAL thinking,” he told her as she... oh, yeah. “A SEAL would assume this is the time I’m going to try to get away.”

“That’s just an excuse to listen at the door.” She kissed him.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said, pulling down the front of her dress to discover that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “It’s going to make it harder to get an annulment if we need to get—”

“I lied,” she told him. “I’m not going to let you annul our marriage.”

“If I’m convicted—”

“I’m not going to let you be convicted.”

Tom looked at her as she sat with him buried deeply inside of her, little pieces of her hair falling out of her French braid, her cheeks flushed, her eyes flashing, and her magnificent breasts bare and all but heaving as she breathed hard and fast, unafraid to let him see that he made her pant with desire.

His wife.

“God, I love you,” he gasped. She wasn’t the only one panting.

“I went to the library,” she said, and he had absolutely no clue as to what she was talking about. She’d started moving, that long, slow slide up off of him, and the even slower slide down that made his eyes roll back in his head. “And I asked the librarians if they knew Mary Lou.”

Who?

“They said she came in... a couple of times a week,” Kelly continued raggedly. “One of them told me... she saw her once with a man. She remembered it because it was so unusual—Mary Lou was always alone. But then... there was this one time, with this one guy who was flirting with her... and even carried her books out to her car. The librarian thought they maybe knew each other. And—get this—the library has a surveillance camera... out in the parking lot because—Oh yes!”

He’d let his mouth take over for his hands, drawing her breast into his mouth and swirling his tongue across the rock-hard pellet of her nipple. What an incredible turn-on, knowing she was so hot for him. But it was hard to say if that was what had elicited her enthusiastic response, or if it was the fact that, at the same time, his hand had slipped lower, touching her lightly between them.

“Don’t stop doing that,” she ordered.

And then she was silent for a moment, and it wasn’t until she started talking again that he realized she had been collecting her thoughts, which was pretty damned amazing, since his thoughts had been narrowed down to “Oh God,” and “Oh yes,” and “Hold on, hold on, don’t come yet...”

“There’s a camera in the library parking lot,” Kelly told him, “because there was a... a bunch of robberies and vandalism about eight months ago. The librarians told me... the camera probably acted as a deterrent... because there were no further problems, but they’ve kept it running. And... you’re going to love this—”

Yes, he definitely did love this.

“They never recycled the videotapes,” Kelly announced. “They just labeled them and filed them. Don’t you just love librarians? I’ve got a month and a half of... surveillance tapes from the library parking lot in the trunk of the car. To take home and watch. And see if I can’t find a picture... of Mary Lou with this guy....”

“Unh,” Tom said, because although none of what she’d said seemed to make sense to him, it seemed obvious from the triumphant ring in her voice that she wanted some kind of response.

“I know,” Kelly said. “It’s probably nothing, but I need to do something... and finding people who actually knew Mary Lou... seems to be a good place to start. I spoke to Max Bhagat on the phone tonight, and he thought that was a good idea, too.”

Max...

“Max suggested... I talk to the other wives and girlfriends of the guys in Team Sixteen... and try to remember the weeks or even months prior to the assassination attempt. If a terrorist targeted Mary Lou as a potential way to get weapons onto the base... he had most likely done some surveillance on the rest of us, too. You know, created additional contacts... that he might be able to use as a backup plan. Max thought we should compare names and even descriptions of people we’d met during that time... see if there’s anyone we all knew....

“He said to tell you... he’ll get out here to see you as soon as he can,” Kelly continued.

But then she pulled his head up and kissed him, which was good, because it meant that neither one of them had to talk or listen for a while.

It was long after midnight before Sam’s cell phone rang again.

He knew it was Alyssa calling, and he answered by saying, “What’s the situation in San Diego?”

“We’ve got two agents inside of Donny DaCosta’s house,” she reported, “with him since he’s refused to leave, and we’re attempting to locate Mary Lou’s landscaper friend without tipping off the entire city to the fact that we’re looking for him. If someone—Don’s ‘alien’—is following him, it could well be in an attempt to locate Mary Lou. If we do it right, we can pull both men in for questioning at the same time.”

“Max go to San Diego?” Sam asked, trying not to think about that kiss he’d seen. The thought of Alyssa with Max had always been hard to cope with, but seeing them together like that had been unbearable.

“No, he sent Peggy and Yashi out there for now. He went back to Sarasota, for—” She paused. “—a number of reasons, one of which has to do with some political bullshit about some Senate investigating committee.”

“It must be tough, having to spend so much time apart from him,” Sam said.

She didn’t answer, instead taking a conversational turn to her favorite subject. “Are you ready to come in yet?”

“Please don’t hang up on me,” he said.

“That sounds like a no.”

“Let’s not play this game.” He was so freaking tired. “Please? I just want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” she said. The clarity of their satellite connection was so good, it was almost as if she were sitting right beside him. “Tell me about Ringo.”

That caught him by surprise. “What’s to tell that you don’t already know? It was a nickname.”

“I want to know about Ringo, the person. Your sister said that starting around eighth grade, you stopped answering to Roger—that you became Ringo.”

“You called her.”

“Yes,” Alyssa said. She didn’t mention his revelation about his father, although he knew she must’ve talked about that at length with Elaine, who was always more than willing to discuss her theories on the topic. “She wanted me to tell you to turn yourself in. She’s worried about you.”

“She shouldn’t be.”

“She is. She still calls you that—Ringo.”

Back to this again. Sam sighed. “Yeah. Noah and Claire do, too.”

“Were you into music or something?”

“No,” he told her. “It was just a nickname Uncle Walt gave me. That was all he ever called me and, you know, I actually thought at one point that he’d forgotten my real name.”

“That’s pretty unlikely, considering you spent a lot of time at his house, hanging with his grandson. He probably had a copy of your rap sheet.”

“Yeah, well, I was a stupid kid, what can I say?” Sam laughed softly. “Shit, I was dumb as a stone. I still am, sometimes. But I didn’t have a rap sheet,” he added.

“I was kidding, Starrett. So why did you refuse to be called Roger? And why did you drop Ringo and turn yourself into Sam?”

“I didn’t drop Ringo. I just... stopped hanging around with the people who called me that. After Walt died, I just...” He’d found it hard to keep up their friendship after Noah had married Claire. They suddenly had completely different lives. Sam, in the Navy, working his ass off to achieve what had started out as Noah’s dream—to become a SEAL. Then, when he did, it was hard to visit. It seemed almost as if he were rubbing Noah’s nose in it.

And yet the few times he had come back, Nos had seemed so happy with his family and his job. Working for Walt...

“I’m still Ringo,” Sam told her. Although every time he caught sight of himself in the rearview mirror, he gave himself a scare. With his haircut and clean shave, he looked like a total stranger. And forget about the clothes he’d picked up on sale at the Men’s Warehouse. He’d transformed himself into someone completely unrecognizable.

“I don’t think you are,” she said. “I think you took Ringo and packed him up and stuck him in some storage box somewhere—same as you did with Roger back in eighth grade.”

“Okay,” Sam said, trying to pretend that her words hadn’t shaken him. Was it possible she was right? Had he really done that? He tried to keep his voice light. “You now know too much about me.”

“Do you have any pictures?” she asked. “Of you as a kid?”

Sam leapt upon the tangent eagerly. This was much easier to talk about. “I think Lainey has a bunch. Probably Noah, too. Walt liked taking snapshots. He had a couple of drawers filled with old photos and letters and all sorts of stuff. Documents. I remember he and Dot got this dog, it was probably back around 1962, and they saved the records from the vet from when he was treated for worms. The dog had been gone for years, but that piece of paper about those worms was in that drawer. I used to love to sift through that stuff. You never knew what you would find. And then one day I found—”

He stopped. Was he actually going to tell Alyssa this story?

Yes.

If he told her about this, then she’d understand why he’d purposely packed Roger into a little box—just like she’d said. And maybe she’d also understand why he was still Ringo—why he’d always be Ringo. At least he hoped he still was.

“One day you found what?” Alyssa asked.

He was going to have to start closer to the beginning.

“Uncle Walt walked with a limp,” he told her, “because Dot’s brother didn’t like the idea of her marrying a black man, and the motherfucker went after Walt with a sharpened shovel and damn near cut off his leg. Walt had just come back from the war, and he’d flown God knows how many missions without being injured, and this little racist prick goes and cripples him for life.

“Noah and I hated all of Dot’s brothers, but we particularly hated the one who cut him—her younger one. We used to imagine what we would have done if we’d’ve been there. We used to rant and rave about vengeance and justice, and Uncle Walt would just chuckle and say he’d gotten the ultimate revenge by living a long and happy life. He had the love of a woman he adored and his two boys to look after him in his old age.” Like Walt hadn’t been the one who’d looked after Sam and Noah right up to the day he died. “That’s what he called me and Nos. We were his two boys.”

Sam had to clear his throat.

“I can’t begin to tell you what it meant to me to have Uncle Walter claim me as his own,” he told her. “Before I met Noah, I was kind of, like, I don’t know, this little wild animal, I guess. I mean, in hindsight it’s pretty obvious that my father was fucking with my brain—although it sure as hell could have been worse, huh? My mother spent most of the time stoned on Valium and Lainey was great, but she was so much older than me....”

How could he explain this? “See, no one ever touched me,” Sam said, “and I think little kids really need to be touched. You know, hugged. Even little boys. Especially little boys. Walt used to just grab me in a bear hug, and Dot kissed me hello every single time I walked into her house, and even Noah was so comfortable with himself and so at ease with being affectionate that he used to put his arm around me when we were just sitting around and...

“For the first time in my life I felt like I had a home. I was safe when I was with them. I could say anything and never be called stupid. I could break shit, you know, and it would be okay. We’d all just work together to glue it back together. It was... the first time that happened I

was...”

He couldn’t begin to find the words. So he just plowed ahead. “I started doing better in school, because if Walt’s face could light up like that when I got a C plus, I wanted to see what he would look like if I got a B or, shit, an A. I even stopped fighting.” Sam caught himself. “Well, I tried to stop fighting. Every now and then some asshole caught me off guard. But I did try.

“In eighth grade, Noah and I started taking flight lessons. Dot and Walt owned a flight school as well as a fleet of small planes, and Walt told us if we passed the written course with a B plus or better, he’d start taking us up in his Cessna. So we had these big books that he gave us, and we spent all our time studying aerodynamics. It wasn’t easy. I remember I was taking a break. Noah was on the phone with some kid from his science class about the project they were doing, so I wandered into the dining room and starting poking through the picture drawer, and I noticed there was an old envelope slipped in there, along the side, that I’d never noticed before.

“I took it out and opened it, and it was a bunch of really old pictures. A girl and three boys—two bigger boys and one little tiny one, much younger than the others, like maybe Haley’s age. I loved looking at old pictures because it was like staring into a time tunnel. The cars in the street, and the clothes, and even the expressions on the kids’ faces was like from a totally different world. So I flip the picture over and on the back it says, ‘Dick, Frank, Dorothy, and baby Roger, 1934.’

“And I realize, holy shit, this is Dot and her brothers, and I turn the picture back over to get a better look at the baby—because he’s going to grow up and swing that shovel at Walt, and he’s got this goofy smile on his face. He’s just a little kid. But there’s more pictures, so I look through them, and there’s Dot in her uniform with her brothers, and the little one, Roger—God, I hated that he had the same name as me—was about my age, and I’m still looking hard into his eyes, trying to see the evil that’s in his heart.

“And then I pull a piece of paper out of that envelope, and it’s some kind of official document, and I realize it’s a marriage license between some guy named Percy Smith and... and Dorothy Elizabeth Starrett.”

“What?” Alyssa said.

“Yeah. Dot was married before, too,” Sam said. “Just like Walt. I knew that. Smith was her first husband’s name, and she kept it after he died. I guess it just never occurred to me that she’d once had a maiden name. All the correspondence I’d read had been to and from Lieutenant Dot Smith.

“So I sat there, staring at those pictures, sick to my stomach, because my father was Dot’s little brother, Roger. My own father had crippled Walt. And I was convinced more than ever that Walt and Dot didn’t know my real name. I’d been Ringo to them for so long, I thought...”

He had to take a deep breath. “I thought that they couldn’t possibly know who I was, because if they did, I surely would not be welcome in their house. And I was sick about that. Sick about them finding out and sending me away, and sick about deceiving them. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Oh, Sam,” Alyssa murmured.

“I went home and I didn’t sleep at all that night. The next day was Saturday, and Noah was working on his science project in the morning, and I knew it, so I went over to the Gaineses’ house, and I took that big flight textbook and I marched up to Walt and I put it on his desk.

“And I said, ’Thank you for letting me use your book, sir.’

“And he kind of sat back in his chair and said, ’You’re not giving up, are you?’ ” His voice had been so mild, and his eyes had been so warm. Walt’s eyes were always warm. Roger had nearly started to cry right then and there.

“I told him that I couldn’t take flying lessons from him,” Sam told Alyssa now, “because I couldn’t afford to pay for them. And I didn’t feel right taking them for free. Taking his charity. And Walt, he never really got angry, at least not at Noah and me, but he got pretty grim at that. He told me that it sounded like those were my father’s words dribbling out of my mouth."

“And I said that my father didn’t know about the lessons. And Walt just kind of looked at me. I’m sure he was trying to figure out what was going on. He asked me—” So gently again. So Walt. “—didn’t I want to learn to fly? And I kind of scraped my courage together and squared my shoulders and I told him. I told him that he didn’t know who I really was, and that he wouldn’t want to be so charitable, giving me expensive things like flying lessons, if he knew my last name.

“Walt was completely floored, I’m sure. I was bracing myself to drop the bomb and tell him I was the son of his mortal enemy, Roger Starrett, when he dropped what felt like a bomb on me. He goes, ‘Roger Starrett, you don’t really think I don’t know your name, do you? Why do you think I call you Ringo? It’s a play on the spelling of Starrett. You know, Ringo Starrett, Ringo Starr...?

“Now it was my turn to be floored. And I told him that I’d just found out, just yesterday, that Dot was my real aunt, my real blood relative—not just pretend, the way I’d thought. I told him that my father was the same brother who’d crippled him, and I said something like, ’I’m a Starrett, too. You should hate me.’ ”

It was then that Walter got it. He understood that Roger had come to him to return that book to make it easier for Walt to kick him out of the house, out of their lives.

“And Walt said—I’ll remember this forever.” Sam’s voice shook but he kept going. “He said, ‘Ringo, sweetheart, you are not your father. You are you, and I will love you until the day I die. I would love you even if you told me your last name was Hitler.’ He told me that Dot was a Starrett, too, and he didn’t have any trouble loving her, either. It was, um...”

Sam’s voice didn’t just shake, it flat-out wobbled, and he stopped. “It was the first time I really, truly understood the way love was supposed to be,” he whispered. “Unconditional.” Up to that very moment, the blessed sanctuary he’d found at the Gaineses’ house had always been something that could’ve been taken away from him. He’d lived every day knowing that sooner or later he’d do what he always did and go too far. He’d do something unforgivable and he’d be cast out of this paradise he’d found.

“I started to cry,” Sam admitted. “I mean, not just a quiet manly tear rolling down my cheek, but you know, a big snotty waterfall—sobbing and shit. And that embarrassed the hell out of me even though it wasn’t the first time Walt had seen me melt down."

“I was about to flee the scene, but Walt grabbed me and hugged me and he told me he’d never been more proud of me than he was right at that moment—especially so because I was crying. He told me that people with big hearts cried and that showing emotion was something I should never be ashamed of. And he told me, um—”

Sam’s voice was shaking again—that “no shame” crying thing was something he still couldn’t quite manage, so he cleared his throat, but it didn’t help, so—fuck it—he just pressed on.

“He told me that even at age twelve I was one of the best men—one of the most honorable—that he’d ever had the privilege of knowing, and that I was going to grow up to be a good man, and that there was no better goal in life than that—to be a good man, to be honest and forthright, to do the right thing—even when it was terribly hard to do so.”

Sam took a deep breath. “That’s what I was trying to do by marrying Mary Lou. The right thing. Only I was stupid, because marrying someone you don’t love isn’t the right thing to do, and if Walt had still been alive, he would’ve told me that. I’ve tried my entire life to be a good man, to be someone Walt would be proud of, and I think I’ve probably managed to fail with the things that matter the most. You and Mary Lou, and now Haley.”

Alyssa was silent.

“You still there?” Sam asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I am. Still here.”

Except she wasn’t. Not really. His bad choices, his stupid mistakes had made him lose her a long time ago.

“I’m so sorry I hurt you, Lys,” he said softly. “I was just trying to, you know, be a good man, and instead I really fucked the duck.”

“Yeah,” she said with a soft laugh. “You’ve really got to stay clear of those ducks, Ringo.”

He laughed, too, but then he stopped. “You really think I packed up Ringo, the way I did to Roger? And I definitely did that with Roger. After finding out that my father was the one who attacked Walt, I didn’t want his name. If I had been old enough, I would have legally changed it. Shit, if I could have, I would have removed his blood from my veins, I hated him that much. Although...”

“What?” she asked.

“After finding out what I found out after he died, you know, the pictures of little kids.” Sam shook his head. “It made more sense. His anger and his hatred, you know? He freaking hated himself, probably even back when he was seventeen, when he went after Walt with that shovel. I mean, imagine going through life wanting something that you know is wrong. He was raised to be devoutly religious. Even homosexuality was looked upon as something evil in his church, and he didn’t just like men—which in his mind would’ve been enough to doom him to hell—he liked little boys.

“And here comes his sister, announcing that she’s going to marry a black man, which at that time, in that part of the country, was nearly as taboo as being a pedophile. And she just didn’t give a damn, and all of his anger and frustration and self-loathing pushed him over the edge.” Sam laughed softly. “Obviously, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to understand him. I mean, it’s one thing to hate the person who’s hurt someone you love and label him evil, you know, the way I did when I was twelve and I saw those pictures of him when he was a baby. But I think it’s more likely that he was just a fucked-up man with a shitload of self-hatred.”

He sighed and they sat there for a moment in silence. In two different cars, on two different sides of town.

“Ringo wouldn’t have gone six months without seeing Haley,” he said. “Jesus, Alyssa, do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”

“Yes,” Alyssa said. “She will.”

“You know, I think the only thing worse than her not recognizing me is her actually remembering who I am—and knowing that she probably spent six months wondering where I went.”

“You can make it up to her,” Alyssa said.

“How?”

“Like Walt said, you’ve got a big heart, Ringo. I’m sure you’ll figure out the best way to use it.”

Sam laughed. Then stopped. “My heart’s telling me to find her, Lys. I know you want me to come in and let you be the one to track her down and pick her up, but God damn it, I can’t do it that way. Because I know how it would go down. Mary Lou would be grabbed and Haley would be yanked out of her arms and handed off to some stranger, and they’d both freak out. I won’t let it happen that way.

“I’ve made arrangements for Nos and Claire to take care of Haley. But I thought if I could find Mary Lou first, then I could take them both with me to Noah’s house and make sure Haley was comfortable there before I turned me and Mary Lou in and...”

Alyssa was silent.

“I know that you think it’s about me not trusting you, but it’s not. I’m sorry I can’t do it your way,” Sam said.

“Let me talk to Max,” she said.

“You said you didn’t have that kind of influence over him.”

“He asked me to marry him tonight.”

Sam hadn’t thought it could get much worse than this. Terrorists—killers—after his ex-wife, his baby daughter God knows where, his former CO accused of treason, an FBI BOLO with his picture on it, and the knowledge that the only woman he’d ever loved really was in the habit of soul-kissing Max—the fucker—seemed about as low as it could go. But no. He’d been wrong.

He knew he was supposed to say something. No fucking way was the first thing that came to mind. “Congratulations.” So this was evisceration. “Seriously, Lys,” he managed to choke out, “he’s a good man. I know he’s going to make you happy.”

And he really did want her to be happy. Really. Really. Aw, shit.

“I didn’t say yes,” Alyssa told him, and the knife blade stopped moving. But then she twisted it. “Yet.” She paused. “I think I might have more influence over him than I’d originally thought. I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

“Great,” Sam said.

“You know what really kills me? That Noah’s your cousin.” She laughed softly. “God, Sam, he even looks like you, doesn’t he? I can’t believe I didn’t see that.”

“He looks more like Walter than Dot,” Sam told her. It seemed surreal that he was able to keep talking to her, considering he was bleeding to death, with his guts spilling all over the floor of the car. “But yeah. We kind of look alike, even though it was really his father who was my first cousin. But you know, most people can’t see past the different skin tones.”

“He’s got your beautiful smile.”

Beautiful. At any other time, that would have made Sam’s heart beat hopefully. Alyssa thought his smile was beautiful. Fuck of a lot of good that was going to do him with her married to Max.

“I think it’s probably more accurate to say that we’ve both got Dot’s smile,” he countered. “She was just as amazing as Walt, Lys. Knowing her was a... a gift. You would’ve loved her. She was a lot like you in so many ways. Fearless, you know.”

“You think I’m fearless?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She laughed. “Well, thanks, but you’re wrong.”

“You’re fearless when it comes down to the things that really matter.”

“Thank you,” she said softly. “When did she die? Dot?”

“In ‘95. She had another stroke and... she died in her sleep,” Sam told her. “She just didn’t wake up one morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Look, I have to go. Thanks for talking to me.”

“I’ll call you in the morning,” she said. “After I talk to Max.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. He hung up the phone, and then proved—if only to himself—that his heart was very big, indeed.