“Hello there,” he said when he reached her. “Glad you could make it. I stayed close by because I didn’t want to miss you.”

Warmth spread up from her cool toes to her fingertips. “I’m sorry for being late. I was . . .” Unable—or unwilling—to chalk her lateness up to something as seemingly harmless as fish bones, she trailed off.

“It’s okay. That’s the beauty of being retired. We have all the time in the world.” He held his arms open wide, knocking his cane to the ground in the process.

She bent down and retrieved it for him, then tilted her head up the beach. “Shall we?”

A line of gulls soared overhead, some with wings beating, some coasting, all of them brilliant white against the pale blue morning sky. Cotton-ball clouds rested just above the horizon.

“How long have you had this?” Violet brushed the cane with her fingers.

“Oh, about five years or thereabouts.” He plunked the tip of the cane down in the sand a little harder than necessary. “Every time I think I’m ready to ditch it, my knee starts to ache again. When that happens, this stick is a lot stronger than my bad leg is.”

“Why do you have to use it?” When he didn’t answer right away, she apologized. “It’s not my business.”

“No, it’s fine. Really. It was just a judgment call on my part. The wrong one, in hindsight.”

She waited, curious but not pushing, and he eventually spoke. He told her he’d gone back to the scene of a burglary because something wasn’t sitting right with him, and he wanted to work through the details in the place the crime had happened. It had been a week and they still hadn’t found the suspects, so on the way home from work, he headed to the house to drive by and see if anything spoke to him.

He said that’s when he’d seen the object lying near the gutter at the end of the street, as if someone had tried to throw it in but missed. Frank slowed next to the gutter and saw the whole scene play out in his mind—the intended quick-grab burglary, the chaos that ensued when the homeowner roared down the stairs, the burner phone tossed from a moving car. Just as Frank opened his door and leaned down to reach for the mangled phone, shots fired. His leg cracked and burned, and all went dark.

“None of the guys understood why I did it—why I went back there alone just because something didn’t feel right. But I knew there was more to the story and the family deserved to know the truth. It was vain, but I felt if I didn’t do it, they’d never find out who broke in and why. Looking back now, I see the utter stupidity. But at the time I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“Would you do it differently now?”

He hesitated. “Probably not. The family had closure, and that’s what I wanted. It felt right, even though it left me with a bum leg and an extra appendage.” He twirled the end of the cane.