"I'm not going to be all right," Samantha was saying. "Why do you keep saying that like I'm some kind of ree-tard?"

"You've had a really big shock, Samantha," Debs said, and in spite of the fact that she clearly meant to be soothing, I could almost hear quotation marks around her words, as if she was reading from The Rescued Hostage Handbook. "But it's over now."

"I don't want it over, goddamn it," she said. She looked back at me as I closed the car door. "You bastard," she said to me.

"I didn't do anything," I said.

"You brought them here," she said. "This was all a setup."

I shook my head. "Nope," I said. "I have no idea how they found us."

"Riiiiight," she sneered.

"Really," I said, and I turned to Debs. "How did you find us?"

Deborah shrugged. "Chutsky came out to wait with me. When the carpet van came, he slapped a tracer on it." It made sense: Her boyfriend, Chutsky, a semiretired intelligence operative, would certainly have the right sort of toys for that. "So they carried you out and drove away; we stayed back and followed. When we all got out here in the swamp, I called in for SRT. I really hoped we'd get Bobby Acosta, too, but we couldn't wait." She looked back at Samantha. "Saving you was the highest priority we had, Samantha."

"For fuck's sake, I didn't want to be saved," Samantha said. "When are you going to get that?" Deborah opened her mouth, and Samantha rode right over her with, "And if you say I'm going to be all right again, I swear to God I'll scream."

To be honest, it would have been a relief if she had screamed. I was so tired of Samantha's carping that I was ready to scream myself, and I could see that my sister was not far behind me. But apparently Debs still nurtured the delusion that she had rescued an unwilling victim from a terrible experience, and so even though I could see her knuckles turn white with the effort of refraining from strangling Samantha, Deborah kept her cool.

"Samantha," she said very deliberately. "It's perfectly natural for you to be a little confused right now about what you're feeling."

"I am so totally not confused," Samantha said. "I'm feeling pissed off, and I wish you hadn't found me. Is that perfectly natural, too?"

"Yes," Deborah said, although I could see a little doubt creeping into her face. "In a hostage situation, the victim often starts to feel an emotional bond with her captors."

"You sound like you're reading that," Samantha said, and I had to admire her insight, even though her tone still set my teeth on edge.

"I'm going to recommend that your parents get you some counseling-" Deborah said.

"Oh, great, a shrink," Samantha said. "That's all I need."

"It will help you if you can talk to somebody about all that's happened to you," Deborah said.

"Sure, I can't wait to talk about all that's happened to me," Samantha said, and she turned and looked right at me. "I want to talk about all of it, because some stuff happened that was, you know, totally against my will, and everybody is really going to want to hear about that."

I felt a sharp and very unwelcome shock-not so much at what she said, but at the fact that she was saying it to me. There was no way to mistake what she meant; but would she really tell everyone about our little ecstasy-inspired interlude, and claim it was against her will? It hadn't occurred to me that she would-after all, it was kind of a private thing, and it hadn't actually been my will, either. I hadn't put the drugs into the water bottle, and it certainly wasn't something I would ever brag about.

But an awful sinking feeling began to bloom in my stomach as her threat began to hit home. If she claimed it had been against her will-technically speaking, the word for that was "rape," and although it was really quite far outside my normal area of interest, I was pretty sure the law frowned on it, nearly as much as some other things I had done. If that word came up, I knew that none of my clever and wonderful excuses would count for anything. And I could not really blame anyone for believing it; older man about to die, penned up with young woman, no one would ever know-it was a picture that wrote its own caption. Perfectly believable-and totally unforgivable, even if I thought I'd been about to die. I had never heard a rape defense based on extenuating circumstances, and I was pretty sure it wouldn't work.

And no matter what I said, even if Dexter's eloquence overflowed the bounds of human speech and moved the marble statue of justice to tears-the very best outcome would be he-said/she-said, and I would still be a guy who'd taken advantage of a helpless captive girl, and I knew very well what everyone would think of me. After all, I had cheered aloud every time I heard about older married men losing their jobs and their families for having sex with younger women-and that was exactly what I had done. Even if I convinced everyone that the drugs made me do it and it really wasn't my fault, I would be finished. Drug-induced teen sex party sounded more like a tabloid headline than an explanation.

And not even the greatest lawyer who had ever lived could get me off the hook with Rita. There was still a lot I did not understand about human beings, but I had seen enough daytime drama to figure this one out. Rita might not believe I had committed rape, but that wouldn't matter. She would not care if I had been bound hand and foot, drugged, and then forced to have sex at gunpoint. She would divorce me when she found out, and she would raise Lily Anne without me. I would be all alone, out in the cold without roast pork, with no Cody and Astor, and no Lily Anne to brighten my days; Dex-Daddy Dumped.

No family, no job-nothing. She would probably even take custody of my fillet knives. It was terrible, hideous, unthinkable; everything I cared about yanked away, my entire life flung into the Dumpster-and all because I'd been drugged? It was far beyond unfair. And some of this must have shown on my face, because Samantha kept looking at me, and she began to nod her head.

"That's right," she said. "You just think about that."

I looked back at Samantha and I did think about it. And I wondered if just this once I could dispose of somebody because of something they hadn't done yet; proactive playtime.

But luckily for Samantha, before I could even reach for the duct tape Deborah decided to impose herself again in the role of compassionate rescuer. "All right," she said. "This can all wait. Let's just get you home to your parents now." And she put her hand on Samantha's shoulder.

Naturally enough, Samantha pushed the hand off as if it were a loathsome insect. "Great," she said. "I can't fucking wait."

"Put your seat belt on," Deborah told her, and, completely as an afterthought, she turned to me and said, "I guess you can ride along."

I almost told her, No, don't bother, I will stay here and feed mosquitoes, but at the last second I remembered that Deborah's record with sarcasm was not good, so I just nodded and buckled up.

Deborah called the dispatcher and said, "I've got the Aldovar girl. I'm taking her home," and Samantha muttered, "Big whoopee-shit." Deborah just glanced at her with something that looked like a rictus but was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, and then she put the car in gear, and I had a little over half an hour to sit in the backseat and picture my life splintering into a million decorative shards. It was a terribly depressing picture-Dexter Disenfranchised, tossed on the scrap heap, stripped of his carefully built costume and all its comfy props-flung naked and unloved into the cold and lonely world, and I could see no way to avoid it. I'd had to go down on my knees and beg just to get Samantha to do nothing while I tried to escape-and she had been neutral then. Now that she was peeved with me, there was nothing I could possibly do to stop her from telling, short of actual vivisection. I couldn't even give her back to the cannibals; with Kukarov dead and the rest of the group either captured or on the run, there would be no one left to eat her. The picture was grim and very clear: Samantha's fantasy was over, she blamed me, and she would take her terrible revenge-and there was nothing I could do about it.