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Lou shot a look at her, hard, worried. “You mean like in Harry Potter?”

She laughed—a frightening, unhappy sound. “Look at all of them. There is more gold and there are more rubies in these trees than there were in all of Ophir. And it will end the same here as it did there.”

“‘Oh, fear’?” he asked. “You’re not making sense, Vic. Come back to me.”

She lowered her head, shook it as if to clear it, then put a hand against her neck, grimaced in pain.

Vic looked up at him from beneath her hair. It shocked him—how suddenly like herself she seemed. She had that Vic smirk on her face and that look of mischief in her eyes that had always turned him on.

She said, “You’re a good man, Lou Carmody. I may be one crazy bitch, but I love you. I’m sorry about a lot of things I put you through, and I wish like hell you’d met someone better than me. But I am not sorry we had a kid together. He’s got my looks and your heart. I know which one is worth more.”

He put his fists on the ground and slid on his butt to be next to her. He reached her side and put his arm around her and hugged her to his chest. Rested his face in her hair.

“Who says there’s better than you?” he said. “You say things about yourself I wouldn’t let anyone else in the world get away with saying.” He kissed her scalp. “We made a good boy. Time to get him back.”

She pulled away from him to look up in his face. “What happened to the timers? The explosives?”

He reached for the backpack, a few feet away. It was open.

“I started work on them,” he said. “A little while ago. Just something to do with my hands while I waited for you to wake up.” He gestured with his hands, as if to show how useless they were when they were empty. Then he put his left mitt down, hoping she hadn’t noticed how badly it was burned.

The cuffs dangled from the wrist of his other hand. Vic smiled again, tugged on them.

“We’ll do something kinky with these later,” she said. Except she said it in a tone of inexpressible weariness, a tone that suggested not erotic anticipation but the distant memory of red wine and lazy kisses.

He blushed; he had always been an easy blusher. She laughed and pecked his cheek.

“Show me what you’ve got done,” she said.

“Well,” he told her, “not much. Some of the timers are no good—they got smashed while we were making our great escape. I’ve got four of them wired up.” He reached into the sack and removed one of the slippery white packages of ANFO. The black timer dangled close to the top, connected to a pair of wires—one red and one green—that went down into the tight plastic bag containing the prepared explosive. “The timers are just little alarm clocks, really. One hand shows the hour, the other shows when they’re set to switch on. See? And you press here to start them running.”

It made his armpits prickle with monkey sweat, just holding one of the slick packs of explosive. A f*cking Christmas-light timer was the only thing between the two of them and an explosion that wouldn’t leave even fragments.

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” he said. “When are you going to plant them? And where?”

He got to his feet and craned his head, looking either way, like a child about to cross a busy road.

They were in among trees on the sunken floor of the forest. The drive leading up to the Sleigh House was directly behind him, a gravel lane running along the embankment, a road barely wide enough to allow the passage of a single car.

To his left was the highway, where, almost exactly sixteen years before, a stringy teenage girl with coltish legs had come bursting out of the underbrush, her face blackened with soot, and been seen by a fat twenty-year-old on a Harley. At the time Lou had been riding away from a bitter argument with his father. Lou had asked for a little money, wanted to get his GED, then apply to state college and study publishing. When his father asked why, Lou said so he could start his own comic-book company. His father put on a puss and said why not use money as toilet paper, it would come to the same thing. He said if Lou wanted an education, he could do what he had done, and join the marines. Maybe lose some of the fat in the process and get a real haircut.

Lou took off on his bike so his mother wouldn’t see him crying. It had been in his mind to drive to Denver, enlist, and disappear from his father’s life, spend a couple years in the service overseas. He would not return until he was a different man, someone lean and hard and cool, someone who would allow his father to hug him but would not provide a hug in return. He would call his father “sir,” sit stiffly at attention in his chair, resist smiling. How do you like my haircut, sir? he might ask. Does it meet your high standards? He wanted to drive away and come back remade, a man his parents didn’t know. As it was, that was very much what happened, although he never got as far as Denver.

To his right was the house where Vic had nearly burned to death. Not that it was a house anymore, not by any conventional definition. All that remained was a sooty cement platform and a tangle of burned sticks. Amid the ruin was a blistered and blackened old-fashioned Frigidaire on its side, the smoked and warped frame of a bed, part of a staircase. A single wall of what had once been the garage appeared almost untouched. A door set in that wall stood open, implying an invitation to come on in, pull up some burned lumber, have a seat, and stay awhile. Broken glass silted the rubble.