"Yeah."
"When Darla finally reached me, I should've said I wanted you involved sooner. I kept telling myself you'd be safer not knowing."
"You were afraid."
"I was wrong."
"You were both," Cole said. "People usually are."
Evan looked at him, and the old instinct to make a joke struggled against the seriousness of the moment. "You're annoyingly calm for someone who spent last night threatening to drag the truth out of Cain Hadley."
"I didn't threaten to drag anything out of him. I gave him time to decide how much he'd like to tell."
"That sounds exactly like threatening him, only with better manners."
Cole laughed before he could stop himself. It was a brief sound, rough from disuse, but Evan recognized it. His own mouth moved toward a smile, and for a moment they were two tired men at the end of a difficult ride, laughing because they had survived it together.
"Eight years," Evan said after a pause.
"Don't start doing the math in a hallway," Cole replied. "It won't give you any of the days back."
"What am I supposed to do instead?"
Cole listened. From the living room came Eli's voice, explaining to Marcus how a paper airplane needed its wings folded evenly. He had discovered that the older rider was unusually patient with mechanical questions, and he treated paper aircraft as a branch of engineering. Evan turned toward the sound.
"Go learn why your kid thinks he can make paper fly better than an engine," Cole said. "That seems like a decent use of this afternoon."
Evan looked down the hallway, and the emotion on his face softened into something Cole could hardly recognize. He went toward his son's voice. Cole remained outside the interview room, allowing the relief to come without trying to make it mean more than it did.
On the third day, Mara read the letters.
She had carried the folder from one room to another since Darla first placed it in her hands. She had opened it, counted the envelopes, read the dates, and closed it again. Finally she took it into an empty room, shut the door, and remained there through most of the afternoon. No one disturbed her. Cole understood that the words belonged to Mara before they belonged to anyone else's account of what had happened.
The letters were eighteen in number, written during the first year and a half after Evan disappeared. He had drafted some while hiding in temporary rooms and sent others through intermediaries who never delivered them. Cain had retained copies, and Darla had eventually recovered them with Evan's help. Each carried a date, and each contained small details of the life he was imagining at home: Eli's first steps, his first words, the sound of Mara laughing at something she pretended wasn't funny.
When Mara emerged, she was dry-eyed and very quiet. She found Cole in the kitchen, where he was cleaning a coffee mug that had already been clean when he started. She set the folder on the table.