“Good morning,” Hook said.

She nodded slightly. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“I’m that predictable?”

“Well, this is your big day, isn’t it? The day your victims begin to sweat. I didn’t figure you’d want to miss any of it.”

“I don’t think of you as my victims.”

She smiled with weary irony. “Oh, I know. I know. You are our victim, right?”

“I didn’t come here to go over that again.”

“What then? To what do I owe—”

“You just said it, Liz. This is your last day.”

She had picked a pebble off the boulder, and now absently tossed it into the water. “What else is new?”

“Today you can confess freely. It will mean something. But tomorrow and after—”

“I know all that,” she cut in. “The others told me about your gracious ultimatum.”

Hook wanted her to face him but she continued to gaze out at the sea. So he spoke to her profile. He told her that he did not want her to go to jail, that if she confessed now she probably would receive a suspended sentence. He told her not to wait for Douglas to make the first step.

“He won’t do it,” Hook explained. “He doesn’t have the guts. I was with him most of last night. All he did was drink himself sick and wallow in the past. He won’t face this thing.”

Again she smiled. “Neither will I, David. Or Mr. Hook, I guess it is now. I don’t care about what might happen in the future. In fact, I don’t care much about the present either. You say Jack wallowed in the past? Well, I’m kind of stuck back there too.” She looked at him now, her eyes brilliant with pain and irony. “I wonder if you could guess where?”

He saw her mouth trembling, fighting to hold the smile. And then abruptly her eyes had filled with tears.

“Aren’t you going to try?” she demanded. “Come on. Guess.”

“His death,” Hook said. “I know.”

“You know what?”

“It wasn’t easy for you either.”

“Why?” she shot back. “Did I love him? Did I ever say I loved him?”

Hook did not know what to say, what he could say.

“After all, I just knew him a day and a half, didn’t I,” she kept on. “Just a few hours. Certainly not long enough to have felt his death as you did.”

Hook looked back at her. “I know you felt it.”

“But not as strongly as you?”

“I can’t weigh my grief against yours, Liz. Mine is enough for me.”

For a while she just sat there on the rock looking at him and crying, but crying like a mute, with her eyes alone. “You didn’t answer me before,” she got out finally. “Did I ever tell you I loved him?”

Hook shook his head. “Not in so many words. But I got the feeling—”