"He's been talking to Mara for almost two hours," she said. "Eli fell asleep in a chair halfway through. Evan carried him to the cot, and the boy woke just enough to put a hand on his sleeve."
Cole listened without moving. That small detail felt larger than the files spread across Darla's table. A child who had never known whether his father would return had fallen asleep while the man was still there, and when he stirred his hand had found proof that the presence remained.
"You don't have to meet Cain," Darla said.
"I know."
"Cho can act on the documents. Your participation isn't legally necessary."
"I don't want him to decide the next move before she does. He wants me at Haramman because he thinks he can define what I've learned and what I'll do with it. If he spends the morning trying to manage me, he may give Cho the space to do her work."
"That's a dangerous amount of confidence in your ability to make people predictable."
Cole looked down. "Maybe. I've been wrong before."
Darla considered him for a moment. "The guilt you've carried about Evan didn't belong entirely to you. Cain benefited from it. As long as you believed you had simply failed to keep in touch, you wouldn't examine the decisions that made it impossible to reach him."
"I still should've looked harder."
"Yes. And I should have protected him sooner. And Evan should have found other people to trust. We can spend the rest of our lives listing the things we should have done. But there is a family in that house tonight because we finally stopped making the same choices."
Cole took a slow breath. He was grateful that Darla did not tell him he had done everything right. Forgiveness that required denying reality had never comforted him. He wanted the truth, with all its untidy edges, because something solid could be built on truth even if it had to be built slowly.
At four in the morning, Cole returned to the farmhouse. Evan was sleeping on the sofa, still wearing his clothes, one arm laid over his eyes in a posture Cole remembered from dozens of roadside campsites. Mara and Eli were resting in the back room. Darla had left a lamp burning low beside the stove. Cole sat in a chair facing the door and slept fitfully for two hours, his jacket still on.
Voss woke him after six. "The vehicles on the main road are gone. They moved north."
"Toward Haramman."
"That's what we think."