“Don’t they do brunch every day?”

“I’m just reporting what I read.”

The waitress brought my eggs and poured Ryan coffee. He ordered what I was eating, and she left.

“Haven’t seen much of you,” he said.

“Things aren’t going as we’d hoped.” And the locals think I’m hitting the sauce. I didn’t say it.

“You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

I smiled. It was our code for sharing info on cases. In the good days.

I briefed him on the exhumation and outlined my conversation with Bergeron.

He told me Rainwater had some of Unka’s thugs cooling their heels at G Division. He and Ollie were heading over there shortly.

Updates exchanged, we sat, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Ryan’s breakfast came. He ate it.

Across the restaurant, the two gray-hairs pored over their book of flora. My gaze drifted to them. I thought, How happy they look. How perfectly matched.

I felt Ryan’s fingers graze the back of my hand. They ran to my wrist, rested at my watch. My skin tingled in their wake. Startled, I looked over at him.

His eyes were on my face. I met them.

So impossibly blue. And tormented, like my own staring back from the rearview mirror.

“Lily’s in jail,” he said softly.

“She’s using again?” I was shocked. “She was doing so well.”

“The kid’s a born actress.”

“Oh, Ryan. I’m so sorry. How … ?” I let the question hang.

“She reconnected with the creep she was seeing last year. He provided a few freebies, then she was on her own. Security nailed her boosting a smartphone at the Carrefour Angrignon.”

“The mall out in LaSalle?”

“Yeah. This time there was nothing I could do.”

Ryan looked so dejected, I wanted to wrap him in my arms and hold him close. To feel the scratch of his stubble against my cheek. To breathe the scent of his cologne.

Instead I sat, picturing in my mind the mixed blessing that was Lily. Recalling Ryan’s account of her entrance into his life.

Lily’s mother, Lutetia, was an Abaco Islander living in Nova Scotia during Ryan’s disastrous undergrad days. The two weren’t exactly lovers, but they were very, very compatible.

After getting knifed in a bar fight, Ryan changed allegiance from the dark side and joined the SQ. He and Lutetia went their separate ways but hooked up years later for a bonus round of enchantment.

Enter Lily.

Wanting to return to her Caribbean home and fearing Ryan might try to stop her, Lutetia didn’t share the fact of her pregnancy. Though mother and daughter returned to Canada twelve years later, Mama opted not to correct that omission.

Fast-forward to the inevitable.

A few years back, Lily showed up at Daddy’s door. She was seventeen, resentful, and angry as hell. And, it turned out, addicted to heroin.