A gentler friend would have soothed Ellard, told him he couldn’t have known, that no one would have suspected, that he’d done nothing wrong.

Cormoran did not do that, because Cormoran understood that a man about to walk into something terrible needs to be clear-eyed, not comforted. You wanted to believe it.

There’s a difference. He said it once, let it land, and did not belabor it, and then he moved straight to the work, because the work was the thing that would save them now, not absolution.

Ellard had known him since before either of them had gray hair, since a time when Cormoran was a young cop and Ellard sold him the tools to fix up his first house, and across all those years the friendship had been built on exactly this: that Cormoran would tell him the truth.

It was going to be the most valuable thing anyone gave Ellard in the weeks to come — a friend who would not let him flinch, because flinching now would cost his daughter whatever chance she had left.

Chapter 8 — Four Days