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The next morning, when people got ready to go after Rick and the others, Daryl showed up, quietly, to go along. And when Rick and Hershel came back with an injured and bound stranger, Daryl let himself into the house in the middle of the family discussion. Carol looked at him, glad he was there, glad she had been right that he wouldn't really leave, but he wouldn't meet her eyes, and she didn't speak.

Daryl kept his own counsel, watching Rick and Hershel and Shane all wag their dicks around. Shane thought he had the biggest, but he didn't know what to do with it, and he let Hershel run him out of the house. Nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. They argued and they glared at each other, and nothing changed.

As the group broke up, Carol approached Daryl, but he avoided her eyes and pushed past her, leaving the house, and her. He didn't want to be with these people—but he didn't want to be alone, either. And since he couldn't have what he wanted, whatever that was, he wasn't going to like what he did have.

The dueling leaders had decided to dump their prisoner somewhere. Daryl thought the whole thing was damned stupid—why bring him back and save him just to get rid of him? Why not just kill him right off? But he didn't tell them that, because they weren't going to listen anyway.

He was as surprised as anybody when the big men brought the prisoner back, though. They came to Daryl. Shane let Rick do the talking—likely because he thought it was a mistake—while they asked Daryl to beat the guy up and get answers out of him.

On the one hand, Daryl didn't want to be helping them. On the other hand, he kind of wanted to hit somebody.

Carol watched him go toward the barn, knowing what he was about to do, and she was troubled. Daryl was more than just a pair of fists, more than a junkyard dog to be pointed wherever he could do the most damage. She didn't think he should think of himself that way or let himself be used that way, and she thought the others could have done their own dirty work. So Rick thought he was above physical abuse, and Shane would be as likely to kill the man as anything else—wasn't that their problem?

Listening to Randall babble on, telling the story of his end of the world, made Daryl sick. For all his problems with his group, they were decent people. They treated each other well, they didn't take what wasn't theirs, they lived by a code. The more Randall talked, the more Daryl remembered what the world had been and why it wasn't such a big loss … and the more he realized that the brutality and the senseless violence hadn't died out with most of the population.

He told the others what he had learned, pretending he didn't see the way Carol looked at him when she understood that he had tortured the guy, and he took off for his own little site, away from all of them. People. You couldn't trust them. Not any of them.

Daryl was pissed when Dale came up to his separate camp. Couldn't they leave him alone? Couldn't someone else do their dirty jobs for them? "The whole point of me coming up here is to get away from you people."

"Going to take more than that."

"Carol send you?" He hated that he hoped she had; the disappointment in her eyes still bothered him.

"Carol's not the only one that's concerned about you, and your new role in the group."

Daryl frowned at him. "Oh, man, I don't need my head shrunk. This group's broken. I'm better off fending for myself."

"You act like you don't care."

"Yeah, that's 'cause I don't."

"So live or die, you don't care what happens to Randall?"

Randall, the whiny boy in the barn? Daryl couldn't imagine why he should care. "Nope."

"Then why not stand with me, try to save the kid's life, if it really doesn't matter one way or the other?"

"Didn't peg you for a desperate son-of-a-bitch."

"Your opinion makes a difference."

Well, that was a laugh. Like hell it did. "Man, ain't nobody looking at me for nothing."

"Carol is. And I am. Right now. And you obviously—you have Rick's ear."

Daryl slung his crossbow over his shoulder and started to walk off, hoping Dale would get the message and go away. "Rick just looks to Shane. Let him."

"You cared about what happened to Sophia. Cared what it meant to the group. Torturing people? That isn't you. You're a decent man. So is Rick. Shane—he's different."

"Why's that? 'Cause he killed Otis?"

Dale stared at him. "He tell you that?"

"He told some story—how Otis covered him, saved his ass. He showed up with the dead guy's gun. Rick ain't stupid. If he didn't figure that out, it's 'cause he didn't want to. It's like I said—group's broken."

This time when he walked away, Dale let him go.

At loose ends, Carol decided to go out foraging for herbs and wild plants. Not that she expected to find much—the area was pretty picked over—but it was something to do.

On her way, she saw Carl sitting near Sophia's grave, and she felt a tug of grief, knowing that he missed Sophia as much as she did. Maybe more. Carl hadn't gotten used to Sophia being gone, and he had a child's faith in everything coming out right, even surrounded by so much evidence that it didn't always.

She approached him, saying, "You know, we'll see Sophia again in heaven someday. She's in a better place." Once, that would have been a platitude. Now, it was mostly the truth.

"No, she's not." Carl got to his feet. "Heaven is just another lie. And if you believe it, you're an idiot."

Carol watched him walk off, thinking how much of his childhood had already been stripped away. Sophia would not have done well in this world. She'd been right—Sophia was better off. And Carl had no business mouthing off that way, no business at all, she told herself. She told Rick and Lori so, as well, in no uncertain terms …

"Everyone either avoids me or treats me like I'm crazy," she said to Lori. "I lost my daughter; I didn't lose my mind!"

But underneath it all, what really bothered her wasn't what Carl had said, but that he just might be right. Heaven was for that other world, the one that was gone. It had no place in this one. And if heaven wasn't real, then what was? God? Human decency? Anything?

From the moment Sophia had been laid in Carol's arms, she'd been her reason for living. And now that reason was gone, along with everything else that had ever had a place in Carol's life. What was left? What was there to live for?

One thing was for sure—she had lost more than just her daughter, and she didn't know if what she had left was worth the trouble.