“Sure,” I said.

Shiloh heard the lie. “Really,” he said, “how are things?”

“Everyone’s treating me okay,” I insisted. “I came to talk to you about something else.”

I looked around. As private as the room seemed, I doubted there wasn’t some kind of electronic surveillance in play, and therefore I had to choose my words carefully.

I waited so long that Shiloh spoke again. “Look, Sarah,” he said. “I understand that what I did in Blue Earth might have changed the way you feel about me-”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“Go on,” he prompted me, gently.

“I met her,” I said. “I know why you left home. I know what you were doing on Christmas Eve.”

I’d said the last thing in the world that still had the power to alarm him. In Shiloh’s lynx eyes, in the sharp way they focused in on me, I saw all the confirmation I needed. I hadn’t really been sure, not until that minute.

“She told you?” Shiloh said.

I shook my head.

Sinclair hadn’t told me the truth about her troubled relationship with her brother, not with words, anyway. She’d done so with her silences, relating her life story with the most important aspect in the unfilled blanks.

She and Shiloh had been extremely close, yet after leaving his family he hadn’t sought her out in Salt Lake City. He’d fled the other way, north to Montana.

They’d run into each other when she came to Minnesota, and Sinclair had made no mention of a fight or disagreement, yet said they’d never gotten in touch again after she left.

Mike without a last name in the bar at MSP, five years ago, just out of a very brief, very wrong affair.

The connection had simply come to me, unwilled, on the flight home. Sinclair had referred to last seeing her brother in Minnesota in winter, just around the time a wreck had taken the lives of the three Carleton students. I wouldn’t have been able to place it, except that I had been one of the patrol officers on the scene, an icy secondary highway outside Minneapolis in frozen late January. That had been only days before I’d learned of my father’s death. Days before my quick trip west, at the end of which I had met Shiloh, drinking and trying to forget a sexual entanglement about which he had shared no details. I had been willing not to ask. In the months and years that followed, I never had.

Small wonder he’d been able to keep his intent to go to Blue Earth a secret from me. Shiloh had learned long ago how to hide his heart. I’d never even known that he knew sign language.

He and Sinclair had both tried very hard to forget; that much was clear. They’d spent their adult lives avoiding each other, an estrangement that had grown to encompass their entire family. Shiloh had brushed aside even Naomi’s innocent, questing attention, when she’d crossed a cardinal, unseen line in suggesting he come home.

Shiloh couldn’t go home, for the same reason he’d been unable to go to his father’s funeral: He couldn’t bear the prospect of looking in his older brothers’ eyes and wondering what they knew, never knowing if they had been told nothing or were feigning ignorance because the truth was too terrible to acknowledge.

He needn’t have worried. Shiloh’s brothers and sisters lived in a fog of self-deception. Naomi never wondered what the Christmas Eve disaster was all about. Bill had possessed all the pieces of the mystery but never quite put them together. Mike was there and suddenly he wasn’t there, Bill had said. My father said God could forgive anything, but not until He is asked. Bill had never considered the prospect that Mike and Sara were guilty of more than everyday human sins. He never let himself wonder how a single instance of teenage drug experimentation could have permanently ruined his brother Mike’s relationship with the entire family.

I wondered how much it had hurt Shiloh’s father, by all accounts a truly godly man, to lie to his children about what Sara and Mike had really been doing that long-ago Christmas Eve.

Perhaps I would have missed all the signs as well-I had even more reason than they did for self-deception-but for Sinclair’s message. I am so glad for you and Sarah. Please be happy. Short as a haiku, both a greeting and a farewell, every word weighted with a lover’s bittersweet kindness and gentle regret, nothing like what a sister should have written.

I’d brought the note with me and handed it silently over to him.

Shiloh studied it longer than the simple text seemed to merit. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low it was barely audible.

“God knows I’ve tried to make sense of it. I never have. Sometimes things just go wrong in your head.”

But he tapped two fingers not against his temple, indicating the mind, but against his chest, indicating the heart.

“I was fifteen when she came home. She was like a stranger to me. But we understood each other. I could talk to her. Not just because I knew sign language. I could talk to her.” He was looking down at the floor, not at me. “We got really close, too fast. One night we were on the roof, during the Leonid meteor shower. I asked her if I could hold her hand and she let me. We didn’t realize we were opening a door that we were never going to be able to close.”

He fell silent. It wasn’t the end of the story, but it was all of it, essentially.

In my mind’s eye I saw her again, Shiloh’s sister, perhaps the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I couldn’t bring myself to hate her. She’d had that same inner light that had drawn me to Shiloh from the first moment I’d seen him. He was right. They were the same kind of people.

What was it I had said to Sinclair? I was scared there was a part of him I was never going to have. I’d been talking about the early days of our relationship, but it had never stopped being true. And I’d been right to be scared.

“All this time, I never realized,” I said softly. “I could never have measured up.”

“That’s not true,” Shiloh said vehemently.

Suddenly the room seemed too small. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come.” I jumped to my feet.

But Shiloh had always been as quick as I was and he was up, too, holding me hard by the upper arms, near the shoulders. “No, Sarah, wait,” he said.

“Hey, hey, that’s enough! Take your hands off her!” Two uniformed guards were pulling him off me.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” one of them asked. I realized that Shiloh’s chair was tipped over on the floor, so fast had he gotten up. It must have made an alarming picture.

“I’m all right,” I told them.

“Time to go, buddy,” the other one said, guiding Shiloh to the door of the interview room. In the doorway he turned to look at me again, and then he was gone.

I’d just crossed over the Minnesota state line again when my cell phone shrilled. Keeping my eyes on the road, I picked it up with my free hand, not thinking about the times I’d lectured drivers about pulling over to answer the phone.

“Pribek?” It was a smooth, familiar voice. “This is Chris Kilander. I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” he went on. “Where are you?”

“I’m, uh, a little ways out of town. Like twenty-five minutes. I wasn’t planning on coming in today,” I said. It was late afternoon; the sun had already set.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Actually, I could meet you outside. At the fountain. Say, in thirty minutes?” He meant on the plaza outside the Government Center. “This won’t take long.”

I parked at a metered spot near City Hall and walked mostly against the crowd, up toward the courthouse. Across the street, at the plaza’s edge, people waited for the city buses, wrapped in their gloves and scarves. At the end of the day, the bus-stop lines grew surprisingly long, like a crowd of people waiting for concert tickets.

Up by the fountain, Kilander stood, not pacing. He wore a long dark coat, looking every inch the lawyer. I loped across the street in a break in traffic and went to his side.