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Special Agent Torres doesn't say hello, and she doesn't sit down. She stops on the mat inside Knox's back door in jeans and a navy blazer, with a canvas bag on her shoulder and her sunglasses hooked in her collar. The first thing out of her mouth is an order. "Bishop says you were given something to remember. Say it."

I like her for all of it. I fold my hands on Knox's kitchen table and give it to her word for word, the way Sandy drilled it into every woman in that barn.

"It was a director's exception. S.H. signed it himself. Nobody at the gate opens a director's exception."

Torres goes still with her hand halfway into her bag. She didn't expect me to have it word for word.

Raven Bishop stands at the counter with a pair of thermoses at her elbow. Raven is a federal agent herself, and she's Jesse Hollister's woman, the one Sheriff Harlan grabbed and threw in his truck the night I turned up in Knox's hay.

Torres drove through the night from New Mexico, and Raven met her in town at first light and brought her out here.

Knox has taken the spot at the far end of the counter, away from the door, where he can watch all three of us over his coffee.

Last night I took Raven's call out of Knox's hand and told her I'd say the sentences to Torres's face. Before that, I'd told Knox I wouldn't give Sandy's lines to anybody until I had something to put next to it besides my own word.

On that call, Raven passed along a question from a federal agent I'd never met: Did I know Sandy's words? Outside that truck cab, the only people who ever heard those words were the women Sandy taught in that barn. Somebody from that barn got out alive and carried them to Torres, and that means my word isn't the only one anymore.

"Who taught it to you?" Torres asks.

"Sandy Canutson. In a barn out on the Thornton routes. They moved some of us once, and she rode up front because there wasn't room in the back. The driver said it on his phone while the two of them sat idling at a gate."

"And after Sandy was gone? Who did you pass it to?"

Sandy taught it to every woman in that barn while she was there. Penny came in after they took Sandy out, so nobody had taught it to her. If Penny's the one who got out, Torres already knows the answer. She wants to hear it come out of me.

"A girl named Penny," I say. "She came in after Sandy was gone. I taught it to her the night before they moved me."

Torres takes her hand out of her bag, pulls out the chair across from me, and sits down.

"Penny said it to me on a couch in Las Cruces," she says. "She told me she said it in her head every night so she wouldn't forget it. She didn't know what it meant. She said Delilah made her learn it."

"Penny's alive?"

"She is. My people went into that barn a couple of nights after you were moved. She was barely breathing when they found her, and they carried her out on a stretcher. She lived. In part, I think, to spite them and to make them pay."

Across the kitchen, Knox sets his cup down hard. He's staring at me. In the horse barn I told him I'd taught Sandy's lines to a girl named Penny. I never told him I didn't know whether she was alive.

Penny was new in that barn when I drilled her on it. She cried every time she got a word wrong, and I made her say it again anyway. I was mean about it, because I was scared they'd take me before she had it right.

I have to ask about Sandy. My mouth goes dry before I can.

"Sandy?"

Torres doesn't soften her voice. "Sandy Canutson is dead. She was found in a culvert outside Santa Rosa, New Mexico, months ago."

She doesn't tell me she's sorry. She tells me where they found her. I'd rather know where than hear anybody say sorry.

When they found her, I was still lying on that plywood with my wrists zip-tied in front of me, waiting for Sandy to come back through the door. Every night since, I've whispered her name in the dark, and the whole time she was already dead.

I don't make a sound. I fold my hands in my lap and dig my nails into my palms. If I open my mouth, I'll start screaming and won't be able to stop. I'm not doing that in front of Torres.

Knox pushes off the counter and comes to stand at the head of the table. He's between me and the back door now, where I can see him without turning my head.

Raven fills a glass at the sink, sets it at my elbow, and sits down beside me.

I drink the water. My hand shakes, and I let it.

"She never got out," I say.