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Stuart was his friend. She deserved to know at least the basic facts. But that was all he could tell her. He’d told no one more than that. Even his good friend Kayla, his brother Cal’s wife, had heard only an extremely edited version of the horrors he’d endured in that hell-hole of a prison.
    “I went to San Salustiano seven years ago, to meet with Santiago Bolivar,” Liam recited. It helped to tell this story as if it had happened to someone else and not to him. “At the time Santiago had run for president against the incumbent, and lost despite a large showing of public support. He was convinced the results had been tampered with, and that the entire election had been a sham. When I went down to talk to him, little pockets of violence and resistance to the special police force had already sprung up, all over the island.”
    He paused, remembering that evening he’d spent, sharing dinner with Santiago Bolivar and his family. Marisala had been there, sitting quietly in the background as the men had talked about the possibility of an all-out war, of a political coup to regain control of their beloved country. And when Liam had finally gone out to his battered rental car, to head back to the hotel in the city of Puerto Norte, she had followed him.
    “I met Marisala that first night,” he told Lauren, trying to keep his voice devoid of emotion. But he couldn’t. Where Marisala was concerned, he simply couldn’t help himself at all. “She was fifteen years old, and…”
    So beautiful. So young and innocent and pure. He could still see her coming out of the shadows beside Santiago’s house to introduce herself. She’d had something to say to the Americano, and despite the fact that she was a mere girl, she was determined to say it.
    “She begged me to talk sense into the men,” he continued, “to keep them from turning this political disagreement into a war. We talked for a long time—she knew a little English, and I knew a bit of Spanish, and I swear, Stu, I’d never met anyone like her before, but she was just a
child
. Anyway, she told me she was afraid for her uncle’s safety.
    “And rightly so,” he added, feeling the familiar queasiness in his stomach. He tried to step back, to push his feelings aside. He was a journalist. It helped if he remembered that—if he focused on the facts alone. “Two days later I met Santiago at a Puerto Norte café, and somehow the special police found out about it. They came to arrest us both. I knew as soon as they realized I was an American reporter, they’d make me disappear—probably permanently—so I ran.”
    He couldn’t look at Lauren, couldn’t look anywhere but out the window at the skyline of Boston. He didn’t want to think about the force of that bullet that had hit him in the back, throwing him forward and down into the dirt.
    “I got away, but I was badly wounded. I knew I couldn’t make it off the island the conventional way because the police were looking for me. I didn’t know where else to turn, so I went to Marisala. She hid me.”
    Lauren nodded. “Go on.”
    “I was hurt pretty bad, and it was about six months before I could even walk again—before I was strong enough to survive the boat ride that would take me off San Salustiano.” Liam massaged his temples.
    “What happened to Santiago?”
    “He was in prison all that time. But we didn’t even know if he was still alive.”
    “This wasn’t when your brother went down there looking for you, was it?”
    Liam shook his head. “No. This was more than a year before that. The special police found out about the boat Marisala’s father had rented, and figured correctly that it was for me, since I was still at large. The government wanted to make damn sure that I didn’t get off the island. I knew too much. So they searched the entire village, and when they couldn’t find me, Tomás Vásquez, the captain of the special police, threatened to burn it. He threatened to kill all of the