‘No, I mean after we came back. I risked my life for you; I’d no idea what you told them. If you’d confessed to them, I’d have been shot for lying. I trusted you to do the right thing. And afterwards, when we went back to mine, we had sex, we lay together and I waited for you to tell me. If ever there was a place or time for it, it was in those hours, lying together. I’d never have said a word, if you’d only told me, I’d have taken it to my grave for you. But you didn’t. You talked about everything but and then you went to sleep and pretended everything was OK in the morning. And I knew then, we were done. You didn’t trust me, which meant I could never trust you.’

‘I did trust you,’ Tony pleaded, turning to her, as if somehow convincing her now of this fact might change everything, might rewrite the past they didn’t share. ‘I told them that. I told you that, in the cellar. I told you I was sorry.’

‘Our entire relationship seemed to be marked with milestones of your apologies,’ Karen said. ‘You didn’t trust me enough.’

‘I was ashamed,’ Tony admitted. ‘It’s not that I didn’t trust you not to tell anyone; I was ashamed. I thought if you knew what I’d done, what I allowed us to do to Martin, that you’d…’

‘What?’ Karen said, stopping to stare at him.

‘That you’d not love me the same anymore.’

Karen nodded, even as Tony realized she was right: he hadn’t trusted her to love him no matter what he had done.

‘Jesus,’ he said, tears springing to his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘And there’s another one,’ Karen said, smiling sadly. ‘I know you are, Tony. I knew you were then, too. But I couldn’t be with someone I’d trusted with my life that didn’t trust me with his.’

‘We need to keep moving,’ Barr said behind them.

Tony looked at Karen, wanting to hold onto this moment, painful as it was, if only because it was something they shared, something that had brought them closer together. But she moved on.

Following her, he realized they were going down an incline, into a hollow in the woods. ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘This is the right path.’

Sure enough, a moment later, they came to the scar of where a stream had once cut through the woods, its bed now cushioned with fallen leaves.

Barr headed down to the right several hundred yards, tracing the dried stream’s progress. ‘Down here,’ he called.

They moved down to where he stood. As they approached, Tony could make out the rotted carcass of a tree trunk, which traversed the bed of the stream.

‘We’re on the right track,’ Barr said. ‘How much further?’