“Why did he send you? Why not just invite me himself?”

“I don’t know.”

“Weird.”

“He always has his reasons, David. Well? Will you come?”

“Busted leg and all?”

She smiled, an elusive tenderness coming into her eyes. “Absolutely.”

“Okay, what the hell.” He grabbed his crutches and climbed painfully to his feet.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Calling Ash.”

After talking to David, Ashley walked up to her rooftop deck and looked west across the Charles River, toward Cambridge. She thought of her brother, battered and beaten, alone with Sarah Balaton, parts of their conversation still fresh in her mind.

“Do you believe her, David?”

“Yes.”

“Do you trust her?”

“Yes.”

“Please be careful. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

“Ash, a couple of months from now, we’ll be sitting in front of the wood stove laughing about all this while Barky soaks his feet and tells us he busted my leg and knocked you on the head for a good reason.”

“And lied to us about who we are?”

“Yeah. That, too.”

Her eyes burned with fatigue and tension, and with hot, unwanted tears. Would there be answers on Badger Rock Island, Maine? Was she making another mistake by leaving her disabled brother with a woman who was deeply, perhaps dangerously, involved with this mind-shattering mess?

“You must stop...I love you more than I do myself...I have kept you alive all these years... What I do, I do only for you...”

As she remembered her uncle’s words, she shut her eyes and sobbed violently, gripping the rail of the deck. “Barky. Oh, God, what are you doing?”

The sound of footsteps whirled her around, and the tears vanished as she saw the tall, ramrod-straight figure of Jeremy Carruthers coming onto the deck. It was ridiculous, she thought, this running away and chasing, this finding and wanting, this aching inside her that wouldn’t go away. The sun and the wind caught his dark hair, and the harsh afternoon light brought out the lines in his face and the darkness around those pale, pale eyes. He looked tired and unamused and not particularly glad to see her.

“How’d you get in?” she asked.

“I pocketed a key when you left me alone the other day. Thought it might come in handy.” His smile was almost sad. “I can’t be trusted, you know.”

She felt an unwelcome sense of guilt, a feeling that was becoming all too familiar. “But you’d have made a good spy. You have the right instincts.”

He joined her at the railing, standing close. The sun had begun to dip beyond the hills to the west, streaking the sky with fiery colors, and there was a slight breeze, tinged with the smell of exhaust fumes. Storrow Drive was clogged with rush-hour traffic.

“Was Oliver brutal?”

This time Jeremy laughed. “Not at all. In fact, we had a drink and shared tales of conniving women.”

“That’s a sexist remark.”

“Oliver’s a sexist man. However, I was able to persuade him that I was a victim of your female manipulations, a fool helplessly in love with a willful and impetuous woman—like Oliver himself.”