He managed a smile. “She would have looked at you, then looked at me, then, right in front of you, I think she would have said, ‘Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.’ Once she got that out of her system, I think she would have gotten to like you.”

I frowned. “Factories that use slave labor?”

“I want her to love her own life and yours enough not to be careless. That’s what I want. That’s what you should want, now more than ever. Jill?” Jill closed her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. And then, “All right, all right! I didn’t see them.

We had another battle to try to sleep through before dawn this morning.

“Be careful,” he whispered. “Don’t give the poor old guy a heart attack.” “I’ll tell him you were worried,” I said. Harry laughed, then sobered. “Be careful, Lauren. Bankole is probably all right. He seems to be. But, well.… Yell if anything goes wrong.”

“the world goes crazy every three or four decades. The trick is to survive until it goes sane again.”

No, we’re not certain. We’re not certain at all. Is he sick somewhere? Hurt? Held against his will for who knows what reason by who knows what monsters? This is worse than when Keith died. So much worse. As horrible as that was, we knew he was dead. Whatever he suffered, we knew he wasn’t suffering any more. Not in this world, anyway. We knew. Now,

If hyperempathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people couldn’t do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?

I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself.