He closed the car door and tossed his keys through the open window into the driver’s seat. They’d be waiting there for whoever needed them. The gesture gave him a peculiar sense of freedom. If this was the end, he’d leave few loose ends for whoever—Mrs. Dodd?—had to clean up after him: a car, a cottage, a dog. The thought of Nora made him wish he’d mentioned her in the note he’d left on the kitchen table. What would become of her?

He trudged up the empty sidewalk past an ice cream shop that was padlocked behind a steel security grate. He chastised himself for every slow step he took. He’d always fancied himself fearless. But here he was, ransacking his mind for any excuse to linger, to stall, to turn around and go back. He passed a drugstore, straw hats and suntan lotion arranged in the dark front window. Plastic buckets and spades. Beach umbrellas. Coleman coolers.

At the corner, he paused in the entrance of a penny arcade. Somehow, the breeze coming off the ocean failed to swirl through the alcove he stood in. The stale air there reeked of bubblegum and saltwater taffy. The tiles beneath his feet were sticky and sand-strewn. He ran his fingers back through his hair. He needed a haircut, he thought—and then he allowed himself a grim laugh at that ridiculous notion.

The old Pacific Park pier, a block to the north, was boarded up now, awaiting demolition. In daylight, the chain-link fencing was festooned with yellow caution tape, like a tawdry crime scene. He remembered the ticket booth there in his boyhood, the turnstile, the high arching entryway that seemed a threshold to wonder. It was all rust and splinters and shattered glass now. The years had not been kind to either of them.

He stared at the darkness under the pier, looking for any movement—a glimmer, a shadow, a struck match. The hot wind was coming in gusts now, lofting the salt spray. Up above his head, a flock of moths battered themselves against the flickering neon sign above the darkened arcade: PACIFIC PARK.

He knew the longer he stood in the safety of this alcove, the harder it would be to take that next step into the darkness. Maybe Eve was watching out there with proof that would clear her good name, clear a pathway back to that night of Bordeaux wine and blithe banter in the hilltop cottage. But maybe Louis Moore was right, and some other fate awaited him. There was no way to learn the truth from a safe distance—no way to see the human heart through a telephoto lens. That much he knew to be true. That much his history had taught him.