“Well,” he says. “This was an emergency. That’s different. You called it right.”

“I’ll go after this.”

“No hurry. Before you go anywhere, we need to decide what you want me to do.”

Trey looks blank.

“About last night. You want me to call the police? Or CPS—child protective services, whatever you call it?”

“No!”

“CPS isn’t the boogeyman, kid. They’ll find you somewhere safe to stay for a while. Maybe get your mama some help.”

“She doesn’t need help.”

The kid is glaring, holding her knife like she’s all ready to stab Cal with it. “Kid,” he says gently. “What she did to you wasn’t OK.”

“She never done that before. She only done it this time ’cause they made her.”

“So what if they make her again?”

“They won’t.”

“ ’Cause what? You learned your lesson, now you’re gonna behave yourself?”

“None a your business,” Trey says, with a defiant glance.

“I’m asking you, kid. I need to figure out what to do here.”

“You don’t need to do anything. If you call child services, I’ll tell ’em you done this.”

She means it, too. “OK,” Cal says. Seeing this amount of fight out of her makes his spine go weak with relief. He got up this morning afraid to see her in case he found her smashed inside, a girl-husk that stared right through him, that had to be steered stumbling from place to place and sat with a bite in her mouth till she was reminded to chew and swallow. “No child services.”

Trey eyeballs him for another minute. Apparently she believes him, because she goes back to her food. She says, “I know that was all bullshit, what you told me. About Bren going to Scotland. So’s I’d fuck off and leave you alone.”

Cal gives up. Whatever he was trying to do there, it hasn’t worked. “Yeah,” he says. “Donie gave me sweet fuck-all. Only I was bullshitting you about the leave-me-alone part, too. Truth is, I got no problem with you coming around. I enjoy your company.”

Trey looks up at that. She says, “I don’t want your fucking money.”

“I know that, kid. I never thought you did.”

She goes still, rearranging her mind around that. The loosening in her face hooks Cal right under the breastbone. “So how come you said all that shite?” she demands.

“For Christ’s sake, kid. You think no one noticed what the two of us were up to? I got warned to back off. This right here”—he points his fork at Trey’s face—“this is exactly what I was trying to avoid.”

Trey gives an impatient hitch of her shoulders. “It’s no big deal. I’ll be grand.”

“This time, you will. Because they got your mama to do it, and she only went as far as she thought would satisfy them. Next time, they’ll go after you themselves. Or after your mama. Or your little brother and sisters. Or me. These are serious guys, doing serious business. They don’t fuck around. They didn’t kill you because they don’t want the attention a dead kid would get, but they will if they have to.”

The kid blinks fast at that. She goes back to shoveling food into her face, head down.

“Jesus Christ, kid,” Cal says, suddenly right on the edge of blowing up. “What the fuck is it gonna take to make you knock it off?”

Trey says, “When I know. For definite. Not some bullshit that someone made up to get rid of me.”

“Yeah? That’s all you want? Just to know for certain?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t work like that. If you find out for certain that Brendan skipped town, you’re gonna want to find out why, and then you’re gonna want to track him down. If you find out for certain that someone ran him off, you’re gonna want to get back at them. There’s always gonna be just one more thing left to do. You gotta know when to stop.”

“I do know. When—”

“No. When to stop is now, kid. Look at you. If they have to come after you again, what are they gonna do? When to stop is now.”

Trey’s face turns up to him like she’s drowning. She says, “I wanta stop now. I’m tired to fuckin’ death of this. At the start, when I first came here, it was like you said: I’da kept going forever. Now I just want it gone. I wanta never think about him again. I wanta go back to doing my own things that I usedta do before. But whatever happened to Brendan, he deserves for someone to know. Just one person, even, to know.”

Cal wasn’t sure, until this moment, whether she understood the size of the chance that Brendan is dead. They sit there, listening to it settle into the crevices of the room.

“Then I’ll stop,” Trey says. “When I know.”

“Well,” Cal says, “there you go. You were asking about having a code. There’s the beginning of it.” He looks at that beat-up, half-comprehending face and feels his throat thicken for all the things the kid is just starting on, all the rivers she’ll have to struggle across that she hasn’t even glimpsed on the horizon. “Finish your breakfast,” he says. “Before it gets cold.”

Trey doesn’t budge. “So are you gonna help me? Or not?”

“Truthfully,” Cal says, “I don’t know yet. First I need to track down the people who came calling on your mama yesterday, and have a talk with them. Once I’ve done that, I should either know what happened to your brother, or at least know whether we can keep looking without getting ourselves killed.”

“What if we can’t?”

“I don’t know. We’re not there yet.”

Trey doesn’t look like that satisfies her, but she goes back to scraping up egg yolk with her toast. “Tell me something,” Cal says. “You think it was Donie who got your mama to do this?”

Trey snorts. “Nah. She’d tell him to fuck himself.”

“Yeah, me neither. But these guys came calling two days after you talked to Donie. That’s not a coincidence.”

“You said if I talked to Donie, you were outa this.”

“Yeah, well,” Cal says. “Things change. How’d you get hold of him?”

“His mam goes to half-nine mass in town every day,” Trey explains, with her mouth full. “She gets a lift with Holy Mike. I waited in the hedge by Mike’s lane till I saw his car go off, and then I went across Francie Gannon’s fields to Donie’s back door.”