“Hildy?”

“Mayor Hildy Intz. She’d love to talk with you.”

“Jesus, CiCi.”

Laughing, she poked him in the arm. “Shit’s getting real, am I right? It makes me think of Simone. I told you how she tried to fit in the box, and finally realized she couldn’t. When she took that leap, she found the answer. Or one of them. Don’t let them keep you in their box, Reed. Damn, that’s my phone. I left it inside.”

“I’ll get it.”

He hurried in, brought it back to her.

“Huh. Barbara Ellen.” With a wiggle of her eyebrows, she answered. “Hi, Barbara Ellen. Yes. Hmm.”

She listened, nodded, sipped wine.

“I see. Oh, I absolutely will. It was wonderful to see you, too. And Cody. Yes, he’s done beautiful work. It’s no wonder you’re proud of him. Uh-huh.” She gave Reed an eye roll. “I know you will. Let me get back to you? Bye now.”

She ended the call, set the phone down, took another sip of wine.

“Barbara Ellen’s anxious to pack up and move, just go back with Cody and be done. Factoring that, she’s nagged Cody into lowering the price—for you, if you take it as discussed—another seventy-five hundred.”

“Oh, shit.”

“She knows you’ll love the house she loved, the house where she raised her children. Obviously, she’s right about that.”

“I shouldn’t have gone up on the widow’s walk.” More rocks, he thought, sinking fast. He rubbed a hand over his face. “It was bad enough before that. It was bad enough just feeling that place, but going up there did it. I can’t talk myself out of it.”

“I’ve never understood why people are always trying to talk themselves out of things they want. You just got another signpost, my man. You ought to follow it.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t I call Hildy, invite her over for a drink?”

He looked at her, nodded. “Why don’t you do that?”

*

As soon as he returned to Portland, Reed contacted Essie, asked her to meet him at the park. He sat on the same bench where they’d sat more than a decade before. He’d taken a new direction right there, with her help.

Now he prepared to do just that again.

In the brisk November breeze, he watched the water, the people, thought back to that hot summer day. Angie’s funeral—a girl who’d never had the chance to change directions.

Maybe that was part of the whole—part of his whole anyway. He’d been given the chance—twice—and believed he had to make the best of it.

After DownEast, he’d wondered and worried if there was a bullet on pause, waiting for somebody to hit the play button. Patricia Hobart had hit that button, and two, not one, bullets found him.

And he’d survived.

No wasting time or opportunities, he thought. No looking back later and thinking: Why didn’t I?

So he sat while the wind kicked through his hair, while winter began to poke its chilly fingers through the balm of autumn and thought of yesterdays and tomorrows. Because, hell, the right now was already here.

He watched her come, his partner, his mentor, his friend. Quick strides in sturdy boots, dark jacket zipped against the wind, dark ski cap over the short, careless do she called mom/cop hair.

Without her, he’d have bled to death on a refinished hardwood floor. As much as he loved his family, Essie was the person he most wanted never, never to disappoint.

“Okay, let me take a look.” She did just that, eyes narrowed and critical on his face. Then she nodded. “Yeah, you look good. A couple weeks on Tranquility worked for you.”

She sat, looked him in the eye. “How do you feel?”

“Better. A lot. Walked every day, jogged a little. Kept up the PT. Fell in love with a sexy, fascinating woman.”

“That didn’t take long.”

“Boom.” He snapped his fingers. “Have you heard of CiCi Lennon?”

“Ah … Artist, right? Local. Isn’t she … like, your grandmother’s age?”

“Maybe. It occurs to me, women have had a profound influence and effect on my life. My mom, sure, and my sister, too. And in a strange, awful way, Angie. You and I sat here the day of her funeral.”

“I remember.”

“You. You’ve had a profound influence and effect.”

“You made your own way, Reed.”

“I like to think so, but you helped me find it. I love being a cop. I hated seeing that worry on my parents’ faces in the hospital, and I hate knowing that’s going to be inside them from now on. But I know they’ll deal. I need to be a cop.”

“I never doubted it.”

He studied the water. “The thing is, neither did I. Even lying on the floor, wondering if that was it. Game over. The decision I made right here—or at least started to make—was the right one. A big part of that decision was Angie, and that night. I can’t stop pursuing that, Essie. I can’t stop trying to take Patricia Hobart down.”

Essie angled toward him. “The bitch shot my partner. Look, I’m pissed we got locked out, and I can still hope the feds run her to ground. But either way, we’ll work it, Reed. We’ll work it off the books, on our own time.”

“They’ll keep me on the desk for a while. Three to six months, I figure. The department doesn’t have our backs on it. You’ve got a family, Essie. We could carve out some time to work it, sure, but by the time they let me come back to full duty, they’re going to have you with another partner.”

“I’m pushing back on that,” she began.

“We’ve got to work the actives. That’s priority. They’re never going to let either of us work the Hobart investigation, even peripherally—and I can’t get too pissed about it. But Hobart’s the key to the rest, and I’m not letting it go. By the time I’m cleared, they’ll put me with someone else. We can both push back, but that’s a big, gaping maybe. And we’ll both have cases that have to come first.”

“You’re circling around something, and I’m not feeling good about it. Are you thinking of requesting a transfer?”

“Not exactly. I found the house. I found it on the island. It’s everything I want and need, and it’s the reason I never found that here.”

“Well, Jesus, Reed, I get how much you want to find a place, but—”

“The place, Essie, that’s the thing. I stayed in CiCi’s house most of the time I was on the island. Not like that,” he said with a quick laugh. “Though if she’d give me a shot … Anyway, I found a lot of things. Bloody Marys and pancakes, yoga on the beach—”

Jaw dropping, Essie held up a hand. “Wait. You did yoga on the beach?”

“CiCi’s got a way. The thing is, I ended up sitting on the rocks down from her place because her house was one I remembered, especially, from a million years ago when we had a couple of vacations on the island. And she ended up asking me to stay because she recognized me—from the shooting, and from my connection to the mall. Her granddaughter was there.”

“Wait, wait, that’s it.” Now Essie punched her palm at the air. “Nagging at me. She’s Simone Knox’s grandmother.”

“Right. You answered Simone’s nine-one-one. I’m looking at all of it, Essie. Angie—I talked to her, made a half-assed date with her minutes before she died. I end up hiding with Brady in her kiosk, with her blood on me. And I end up on this bench with you. I end up on the island because of all of it. I don’t want to get all metaphysical or whatever, but it just means something.”

“Are you telling me you bought CiCi Lennon’s house?”

“No. There were two that hit me back then, back when I was, like, ten years old, and I told her about it because, Jesus, you can talk to CiCi. Or I sure can. And it means something, Essie, that the owner and her son are fixing up the house I remembered—to get it on the market. It matters that when I started going through it, it was—here’s another stupid word, but it was visceral. It was mine. I tried to talk myself out of it. But it was all there.

“I said okay, fine, I could think of it as an investment, rent it out, take some vacation time there. Because a cop has to live where he works, and I need to be a cop. But the thing is, I don’t want to rent it out.”

“Reed, please tell me you’re not going for an island deputy job. You’re an investigator. You’re—”

“No, not a deputy.”

“Then what the hell?”

“Chief of police.”

“You—” She stopped, let out a whoosh of air. “Seriously?”

“I don’t have it yet. The island council has to vote and all that. But I did an interview—a couple of them. And I wrote up a résumé. They’re going to call you, Bull, the lieutenant pretty soon. If I don’t get it … I’m young, not from the island—those are strikes against me. I’m a police detective with a few years under my belt, a good closed-case history, who’s already got a contract on a house there. Those are pluses for me. And the big guns? CiCi. So I rate my chances at about seventy-thirty.”