Of course Jonah was not callous or uncaring. He never had been. Ben had made him into a monster in his mind, because it had kept him sane to do so, but this was the reality: a deeply flawed man, a thief, a coward who ran away. 

“There’s a train going west at half past nine. We'll sneak onto it and go where it takes us, and go somewhere else from there, and stop when we’ve gone as far as we can. And I promise I don’t expect you to forgive me, or anything else. But I’m so tired of not being with you. Come with me. Please?”
“We’re not good for each other,” Ben repeated, mostly to himself. He had to hold on to that, he knew, though he wasn’t sure why anymore, or what it meant.
“Perhaps not,” Jonah said. “But we’re not doing very well apart.”

“Jesus Christ, Ben, my Ben, what happened? What did they do to you? Come on, lover. With me. We’re going together.”

“But I couldn’t. That’s the point. I was too afraid to trust you, and you paid for it. Nobody’s ever cared more about me than about what I can do, and I couldn’t bear to find out if you were different. I was afraid to look.”

“Someone should have helped him,” Ben said. “You take a child, or a man down on his luck, and give him no help, just kicks, and make it so that any way he turns breaks the law, and then tell him he’s a criminal. It’s not right. That’s not how it should be.”