We found a table away from the lights subtly illuminating the surrounding gardens. Several dozen people were enjoying the soft guitar strumming of a young man who occasionally added his voice. At one point a sound more distinctive and soulful than a pack of coyotes rang through the air, and he stopped playing and waited.

“Howler monkeys,” Teo said before I could ask. “If we’re lucky, we’ll see some before we leave.” If I hadn’t known what they were, and the monkeys had howled while I was sleeping, my sadly creative brain would have woven the eerie sounds into a nightmare.

We both ordered the ubiquitous Cerveza Imperial lager, and since we were biding our time, half an hour later our glasses were still nearly full.

I gestured to the gardens. “Is Puerto Rico this beautiful?”

“A few years ago I went back to the area where my mother’s family was from, near Ponce. They call it La Perla del Sur, the pearl of the south. She can trace fragments of her ancestry back to the French Creoles who fled the Haitian revolution. Ocean and hills and beautiful old buildings. I’ll take you there someday.”

That was as close to talking about our future as we had come. Our reunion was still tentative, like a fledgling poised uncertainly on the edge of its nest.

He asked me about the podcast, and I told him about the plan for our second season. He said he would make calls if I wanted, that he knew a few cops in the department we were researching. Delighted, I asked him about the classes he was teaching, and he described a few of his students.

I captured his hand. “We’re on our way back from the abyss, aren’t we? Somehow we’ve found lives we can be happy with. You have the kennel, and your house and your teaching. I have the podcast, my friends...” My eyes held his. “My nieces.”

“You’re in trouble there.”

“What would you say if I ended up raising them?”

“I would say it’s not my decision. And it may not be yours, either.”

“Let’s just pretend that you and I are finding our way back from our mutual abyss. Together. Would Holly and Noelle be a strike against that?”

“This is all theoretical—”

I sat back. “Spoken like a cop.”

“But theoretically,” he went on, as if I hadn’t interrupted, “how could two wonderful little girls ever be anything except another reason to be happy?”

I beamed at him. And that’s when I noticed a man strolling into the lighted area beside the bar and greeting a group of patrons with nods and pats on the back.

“Bingo.” I inclined my head. “Look who just showed up.”

He took my hand, as if we were deep into an intimate tête-à-tête, and then he turned and signaled the woman who had brought our drinks, as if that had been his intention. “Another for both of us?” he said, even though our glasses were far from empty. I watched his gaze flick to the bar and settle on the man we’d come to see.