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His jaw sets hard. His fingers drum once against the door frame.

"You want to put everything we haven't told each other on this bed?" he says. "Fine. You first."

"Me?"

"Your first morning here, I told you a dark-haired woman came to my gate asking about my fights. You went dead still on the guest house porch. I said you knew something about her, and you told me you'd never seen her in your life. Then I asked who sent her, and you didn't answer."

"I hadn't seen her."

"That's true, and it's not what I asked."

He takes one step into the room and stops.

"She parked on the county road at my north fence this morning and watched this place through binoculars," he says. "Hector spotted her, and I walked out to her car. Her name's Audrey Treadmore. She finds people who don't want to be found."

"Who's paying her to find me?"

"A Fredericksburg lawyer named Stanley Rusk hired her to find you. He does Coleman Whitlock's legal work. He wants you delivered to his office, and nobody else told."

My hands go cold on the quilt.

"Rusk gave her a file on you," he says. "It was supposed to list everybody you know. It had one name on it. Mine. Somebody heard you calling for me."

I remember the concrete. One eye was swollen shut, and every breath stabbed. Dutch was crouched at the bars with his cigar glowing in the dark.

'Who's Knox?'

"Dutch heard it," I say. "He'd beaten me so bad I was out of my head most of a day. I didn't remember it until you told me about that woman."

"You remembered it that morning. I watched it come back to you."

"Yes."

"And you sat on it every day since."

"If I'd told you, you'd have gone hunting him that night."

"Maybe."

I look at him.

"No," he says. "Not maybe."

He doesn't let it sit there. "I gave that woman until tomorrow to drop Rusk. If she doesn't, I handle her like one of Whitlock's men. Ozzie's digging into what else Rusk does for Whitlock."

He holds my eyes. "The next time somebody's hunting you, I hear about it the same day."

He has a point. I should have told him the day I remembered. It still gives him no claim to keep his secret about my father.

"Fine. That was mine," I say. "What about my father?"

When I asked him about my father before, he looked out of a window, instead of at me. This time he looks me straight in the face while he refuses me, and that's worse.

"You'll have it," he says. "From me. Not tonight."

"That's the third time you've told me not yet about my father."

"I know it is."