Jill had slept, just enough to take the edge off, and then returned to Kara with a change of clothes and sat back on the sofa chair, legs tucked up in that same friendly pose, and she rambled like someone who hadn’t had a friend to talk to in years, which was true, but like so much else, beside the point.

She talked because Kara was content in silence, and because Kara wasn’t a game player, which made straightforward and unpretentious truth far more effective than any lie. She spoke about the places she and Jack had traveled to as kids, and the increasingly strange people Clare had left them with, and the hijinks they’d gotten up to when, as kids with kid brains and adult skills, they got bored.

All of it was a vehicle to talk about Jack, so much about Jack and the training that had made him what he was, and she segued from there to the strategy that had brought them to the motel and from the motel to the attack itself. “You knew it was a trap,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out why you kept that information to yourself.”

“Everyone knew it was a trap,” Kara said.

“Yes, but everyone else believed they were hunting just one person.”

Kara was slow to respond. “I don’t always catch subtleties,” she said. “Are you asking me to tell you how many of you I thought were there?”

“Nope.” Jill smiled, and she pushed. “Just trying to avoid feeding you information you might not already have.”

The corners of Kara’s lips turned up, and with the same confident, almost cocky tone Jack got when he knew beyond all doubt and in the face of contrary evidence that he was right, she said, “There were three of you. Christopher Holden confused me at first. I thought he was competing with us to get to you. But by the time we made it to Cleveland, I understood. Your brother had already pinged in Texas, so the rest was easy to deduce, but by then I was just better off not knowing anything.”

Jill said, “Do they know?”

Kara shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

Fatalism filled her tone, her posture.

She went back to staring out the window, and Jill sighed in commiseration. “You remind me so much of my brother,” she said. “You’ve got that same crazy, wicked smart way about you, but, if your world is anything like mine was, it doesn’t really matter how smart you are, it’s some idiot guy who’s gonna get the praise and promotion.”

Kara winced ever so slightly.

Jill, slipping through that opening, asked what being a woman in a bureaucracy was like, and she listened and empathized. Having never had female coworkers other than her mother, she was authentically curious about the drama.