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At last, they packed the car. It was time to go back. But something hung heavy in the air. Whatever Rick had brought her out here for, he hadn't had his say yet, and Carol wouldn't breathe easily until he did.

She reached for the door handle on the passenger side. It was locked. She pulled on it a couple of times and then looked at Rick, who stood up behind the open hatchback and looked at her. "They might have lived. Karen and David—they might have lived. And now they're dead. That wasn't your decision to make."

Carol took her hand off the door, watching Rick, but staying silent. She wouldn't fight, wouldn't argue, wouldn't beg. She had made her decision with a clear head; she would take the consequences.

"When Tyreese finds out," Rick went on, "he'll kill you. He damn near killed me over nothing."

"I can handle Tyreese." She didn't think he would hurt a woman, and she thought that with serious consideration, he might understand why she had done what she'd done.

"When the others find out … they won't want you there. And if they don't make it back, if everybody dies of this thing, and it's just the two of us, with Judith and Carl—with my children … I won't have you there."

That was the first thing to really reach inside Carol's shell and hurt her. That Rick thought she would ever do anything to hurt the children, that he didn't know that what she had done, she had done for the children, for Carl and Judith and Lizzie and Mika and all the others … it cut her to the heart. "Rick, it's me," she said to him. "No one else has to know. I thought you were done making decisions for everyone."

"I'm making this decision for me."

"I could have pretended that everything was going to be fine." Tears were welling up in her eyes, and she pressed her hands to her face to stop them. Tears were for before, they weren't for now. "But I didn't. I did something; I stepped up. I had to do something." Despite her best efforts, she couldn't seem to stop crying.

"No. You didn't." Rick was near tears as well, she could see his jaw trembling.

She was losing the fight with her emotions, putting her hands over her face again to regain some control. "If you think I'm going anywhere without Lizzie and Mika—"

"You want them to leave? To go out there with you? Lizzie's sick. Mika is ten years old."

"You can't—" But he could, and he wasn't wrong.

"We'll keep them safe," Rick promised. They stared at each other in silence for a moment. "You're not that woman who was too scared to be alone. Not anymore. You're going to start over, find others—people who don't know. You're going to survive out here. You will." He turned away from her.

"Maybe."

He dropped her pack on the ground next to the car. "Let's … uh, let's find one of these for you." Rick gestured to the other cars around them. "See if one of them has any gas."

Silently, they looked until they found a car that had the keys in the visor. The engine coughed but turned over when they tried it, and it had some gas, although not a lot. Carol topped it off with the gas can from Rick's car and tried to give the can back, but he told her to take it.

At the last moment, she turned and offered him her watch. The one thing from her old life that she had somehow held on to. "Ed gave this to me on our first anniversary." Rick stared at the watch and then looked at her. "Please." He took it from her. "I should have given it away a long time ago." She wasn't that woman now, Rick had been right about that.

Then she turned from him, got into the car, and drove away without looking back.

Rick didn't tell him. Nobody told him. Daryl found out when he asked Hershel, expecting Carol to be with Lizzie, helping the girl recover. And then Hershel didn't even tell him, just said that Carol was okay but he had to talk to Rick about her.

So he did. He found Rick in the middle of his precious crops and he didn't beat around the bush. "Where's Carol?"

Rick looked at Carl, sighed, and looked back at Daryl. "Gone."

"What do you mean, gone?"

"Carl, go on back inside, will you?"

"Dad."

"Carl."

The two looked at each other for a long moment, then Carl grumbled and did as he was told.

"What the hell, man?" Daryl demanded as soon as the boy was gone.

"Carol killed Karen and David."

Of course she had. Daryl wondered why he hadn't seen it to begin with. Carol, so afraid of being afraid, so protective of her people, so determined to do the right thing. She would have done that.

Still. "Shit."

"I couldn't let her come back, you know that."

"So she's out there, by herself?"

Rick snorted. "She's probably safer than we are."

That was debatable, in Daryl's opinion. "You know where she went?" Not that he would go after her, the two of them out in the world on their own, but … he might, someday, want to know where to find her.

"No. She had a car, some supplies … she'll be fine."

Daryl wasn't so sure about that. People needed people. Even now—especially now—you couldn't get by on your own. Not for long. But what was done was done. People here would need him. The sickness had taken a lot of people, and the ones remaining were weak and wasted and exhausted. They needed the strong to stay, to care for them until they got on their feet again. And then what? Got taken down by another virus? Or the prison collapsed, or some other disaster? Well, that was what life was now, trying to find peace between moments of crisis. For Daryl, life had always been a little bit that way. This wasn't any different.