There were no lights tonight. No romance. Just now, all locals thought of when the cave was mentioned was Johnnie Rosedew’s tragic death, and they’d even told the tourists it was off-limits.

“They proved that with Johnnie.”

She could still hear Beth’s panicked voice, the timbre unfamiliar but that note in it undeniable. Beth thought that Johnnie’s death was no accident. That it was caused by the very people who were now demanding silver from Libby.

She’d brought some with her tonight—some of what Mama had sent. Just pounds sterling, coins. Nothing special, not all that much. It wasn’t what they’d meant—she knew that very well. But it may lure the fellow into spelling out what it was he did mean. That was what they needed.

“Libby.” Oliver halted her again before they reached the entrance to the cave, into which Mabena had disappeared. He turned to face her again. “Much as we’ve tried to mitigate the danger to you tonight, there is still some. And I don’t want you to step into such a situation with this burden on your shoulders. Please. Tell me what’s weighing you so.”

She’d said enough that he could no doubt piece it together if he wanted. There was no need to bare her soul to him.

And yet there was no one in the world she’d rather bare it to. She let her eyes slide shut, let her chin dip down. Let all the aches of the last two days—no, of all her life—swim to the surface. “I’ve never had the sort of friends you have here—Enyon and the others. It was just me and Edith at home, a few neighbors and cousins, but . . . but they never understood me. I never fit with them. I thought when Mabena came . . . I thought I finally had a friend. A true one.”

But it had all been a lie, built on nothing but Mabena’s desperation to escape her real home, her real friends, her real family. A whole world she’d never breathed a word of. A love gone wrong that Libby couldn’t have guessed at. A personality, wild and free, that she’d kept so reined in that the Mabena she’d shown Libby wasn’t really Mabena at all.

“I grow so weary of being alone.” The whisper, pitiful even to her own ears, scalded the night like the tears did her eyes.