“He’s with the doctor. He’s alert.”

“Mood?”

The same guard looked at the other, then shrugged. “I’d say he looks happy.”

That made no sense to the warden. X had never lost a fight, not like this. “Stay here,” he said. “No one in or out unless I say.”

Three days until he dies …

It was little enough, but Bruce Wilson had never been a courageous man. When his wife had first been assaulted, he’d planned to flee with his family, and pray to God he never saw X again. He’d been careful about it, too, buying tickets with cash and in secrecy, prepared to abandon everything but the people he loved.

Yet somehow, X had known.

As I recall, he’d said, you are from elsewhere in the South.

Mississippi. The Delta.

And your family has been there for some time?

As far back as memory goes.

I assume, then, that you are familiar with the brutal and once-common practice of hobbling recaptured slaves?

You mean…?

Broken ankles and shattered knees, severed tendons and amputated feet, all very gothic and antebellum …

I don’t understand.

I feel certain that you do.

Then X had placed a copy of the warden’s itinerary on the table.

Charlotte to Atlanta.

Atlanta to Sydney.

The warden remembered little after that but the hard run home and the sound of his smallest son screaming. They’d been in the kitchen—his entire family—and thinking back, he remembered the oddest things: the linoleum floor, curled in the corner, an open bottle of wine, and the smell of burning food. Try as he might, he could recall nothing of his wife’s face or of his older son, though both had been there. What had broken his heart then, and haunted him to exhaustion every day since, was the sight of his baby boy, but really just his legs, the narrow limbs with the scabbed knees, and how they bent at such impossible angles.

Choking on the memory, Warden Wilson moved down the corridor to the cell where the prison doctor stood above a bed, bending low to stitch a cut above X’s eye. Pretending calm, the warden asked, “How is he?”

The doctor grunted once, still working. “A mild concussion and maybe forty stitches. Go on, show him your teeth.”

“Tie off the stitch and get out.” If X was in pain, he didn’t show it. Shifting on the bed, he rose against the pillow, and laced his fingers on his chest. “How’s your family?”

The warden felt a wild panic, and tried to conceal it, pretending to watch the doctor as he gathered his things and left. “They’re fine,” he said.

“And your youngest?” X continued. “Trevor, I believe. How is young Trevor?”

The warden thought, Three days, that’s it, but couldn’t hide the anger. “The limp still troubles him. The pain is never distant.”

“You think me needlessly cruel.”