“So where’s the rest of it?” he asked anxiously, then bent over and carefully set the last page of ancient paper on the pile. Seth wore running shoes, shorts, and a faded navy-blue LAPD T-shirt Salt from his long run air-brushed faint white semicircles around his neck and armpits.

Zoe pulled the minicassette recorder’s earplug from her ear, set down the pen she was using to transcribe notes, then turned to face him.

“He said he would send us the rest of it tomorrow.” She sat at an antique secretary’s desk in the far corner of the Eden au Lac’s largest room.

Her heart softened when she looked at his face. It wore a worried expression that belonged more on the face of a five-year-old with a broken toy than it did on a forty-year-old ex-cop with a half a dozen gunshot scars and a Ph.D. in philosophy. The world saw Seth as a tough guy. To crooks and cops, he had been a legend who could shrug off the incoming rounds and still make the bust. And even scarier (at least to the UCLA athletic department, which had once mistakenly enrolled a basketball star in his class), he gave the toughest grades in the department. But Zoe knew that inside the tough shell and behind the myth was a wide-eyed little boy with an insatiable curiosity and a deep soft heart capable of intense love and immense faith. The love had made her life a steady procession of days each more enjoyable than the one before.

But Zoe had never understood Seth’s faith. He was a scholar of religion and he knew the deceit and lies that underpinned every religion. Still he believed. Where somehow he found a reason to sustain his faith, she saw a sham. She didn’t—couldn’t—believe in God. Seth did. It was a mystery that their years together had done little to illuminate.

“Tomorr…?” He let the word trail off as he gave her a frustrated, eyes-closed grimace.

Zoe nodded as she stood and walked over to him. The powerful aroma of his strenuous workout had nearly faded, but the intense masculine fragrance he gave off triggered a long series of sensual memories. She remembered the taste of his salt on her tongue and the slick hardness of his bare muscles. For an instant, she thought of slipping quickly out of the flowered sundress under which she wore only the bottom of her bikini. Instead, she said, “Max is a very strange man, but very sincere—at least I believe so. He said that if he thought we truly understood the piece you have now, the importance of it, then you could have the rest.”

“Have?” Seth responded. “Just have… not buy, read, borrow. Have?”

Again Zoe nodded as she put her hand on his shoulder. “All this stuff doesn’t matter to him anymore, he said. He wants to atone.”

Seth nodded. “It’s certainly the right thing to do, even if it does come from looking at death in the mirror.”