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"You sat outside it."

"In a turnout on a ranch road west of his back gate, with my lights off." He sets his keys on the counter. "Till his vineyard crew showed up at first light."

"I asked you not to go out there." My voice stays low, but it shakes anyway. "You promised not to go through his gate. That's all you promised. Then you let me fall asleep on your chest like you'd given me what I asked for."

"You knew the difference. You said so before you fell asleep. It's not what you asked for. I knew that when I said it, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend different."

"You kept the letter and broke the spirit. Daddy preached whole sermons on men like you."

"Your daddy can preach on me all he wants." His jaw goes hard. "He sat at his own kitchen table and told me you were restless. He never once asked a living soul to look for you. Don't hold him up to me as a measure of anything."

"I know exactly what my daddy didn't do," I say. "I'm the one who sat in the dark waiting on him to do it."

Knox looks at the window instead of at me, and he keeps looking at it. I've watched men decide what to keep from me for a year, and that's what this looks like.

"What else?" I ask.

"What?"

"You looked away. There's something else about my father."

His jaw works. "Not this morning."

I let it sit, because I can only fight him on one thing at a time before breakfast. "Then tell me why you promised me anything at all."

"Because it was true, and it was all I had to give you." He pulls out the chair across from me and sits, so we're eye to eye over the table. "You drew that brand on me so somebody besides you would know where that cellar is. A drawing wasn't enough. I needed to see that ground with my own eyes before anybody set foot on it."

"His men tracked me across half this county in the dark." I push my cold coffee away before I slosh it across his table. "One of them found my boot prints in the mud around a stock tank in somebody's pasture, and he read them by flashlight. He was on the phone to the others before I was out of the brush. They aren't fools, Knox."

"No. They aren't." He lays one hand flat on the table. "Sometime after midnight, a pickup came down a gravel road out of his vines with a spotlight. The beam ran along the ditch and across my hood."

I know that kind of light. At the stock tank, a beam like that swept the brush an arm's length from my face.

"It didn't stop," he says.

"This time."

"Maybe next time, too. Sitting out there got me a good look at that road, but it also got me lit up. I won't park there again."

He leans back in his chair. "That truck only drove one stretch of road. It came down from the vines to his back gate, west of the front one, and went back up the same way. It never went near his tractors or the shed on the front drive. Whoever sent it out cares more about that one road than anything else he owns."

I never saw that road from the highway, but I saw where it starts. The night I got out, a stock trailer sat idling on the gravel at the mouth of the tunnel below the barrel room, with its running lights on. I turned my back on it and ran uphill into the vines.

"Looks to me like that road runs from his tunnel down to that back gate," Knox says. "I'd bet that's how he hauls, so nobody on the highway ever sees a trailer go up his front drive. I'll know for sure when I see one on it."

"That's the road they were going to haul me out on."

"I know."

"I'm asking you for one thing," I say. "Next time you go out there, tell me first. Where you'll be, and who's with you. I lay in that cellar for weeks with nobody on this earth knowing where I was. I'm not going to sit in your kitchen wondering the same thing about you."

He doesn't answer right away. His fingers drum once on the table while he weighs what he's willing to give up.

"You'll know where I'm going and who's with me," he says. "I won't promise you when I'll be back. Some nights I won't know that myself."

"That's fair."

"My turn. You don't climb in anybody's truck and come after me."