She nodded, gently rubbing the backs of his fingers. “It’s too bad that the search for Kim’s father didn’t have a happier ending.”

“Yes.”

She pointed to his other hand, the bandaged one. “How’s the arrowhead wound?”

He raised the hand from the bed and looked at it. “I’d forgotten about it.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“I don’t mean the injured hand. I mean the arrow. The great arrow mystery.”

“You don’t think it’s a mystery?” he asked.

“Not a solvable one.”

“So we should ignore it?”

“Yes.” When he didn’t appear convinced, she went on. “Isn’t that just the way life is?”

“Full of inexplicable arrows falling out of the sky?”

“I mean, there’ll always be things we don’t have the time to understand perfectly.”

It was the sort of statement that bothered Gurney. Not that it wasn’t true. Of course it was true. But he felt that the tenor of it constituted an attack on the rational process. An attack on the way his own mind worked. Yet if ever there was an argument not worth getting into with Madeleine, that was it.

A young nurse came to the door, pushing ahead of her a TV on a rolling stand, but Gurney just shook his head and waved her away. RAM’s “horrible tragic fireball” could wait.

“Did you understand Larry Sterne?” Madeleine asked.

“Maybe part of him. Not all of him. Sterne was … an unusual creature.”

“It’s nice to know there aren’t a whole lot of them running around.”

“He thought of himself as a thoroughly rational man. Thoroughly practical. A paragon of reason.”

“Do you think he ever cared about anyone else?”

“No. Not a bit.”

“Or trusted anyone?”

Gurney shook his head. “ ‘Trust’ would not have been a meaningful concept to him. Not in the normal sense. He would have seen the willingness to trust as a form of weakness, an irrational flaw in others, a flaw that he could exploit. His relationships would have been based on exploitation and manipulation. He would have viewed other people as tools.”

“So he was all alone, then.”

“Yes. Completely alone.”

“How dreadful.”

Gurney almost said, There but for the grace of God go I. He knew how isolated he could become and hardly notice that it was happening. How relationships could slip away like smoke in the breeze. How easily he could sink into himself. How natural and benign his isolating obsessions could seem.

He wanted to explain this to her, explain this peculiarity of his being. But then he got that feeling he sometimes got when he was near her—the feeling that she already knew what he was thinking without his having to say the words.

She looked into his eyes, squeezing his hand and holding it that way.