Sara was looking better. There was color in her cheeks and her back was straight, head high. In fact, Gabriel would almost argue it was the best he’d ever seen her look, calm and animated. As if after seeing the photos, hitting the bottom of the barrel and almost drowning in the dregs of her fear, she had climbed out with a whole new determination to not live her life that way.

Gabriel had thought she would want to be distracted, to ignore the two murder cases for awhile. He had been prepared to suggest a walk to the river, a late lunch, maybe even a movie. But when they’d arrived back at his apartment, Sara had dropped her bag in the living room, put Angel’s cat food away in his pantry, and then sat down on the couch in his office and asked him to outline the physical evidence they had from the Donovan case that had the potential to be tested for DNA.

“Are you sure you want to do this right now?” he asked. He had taken a peek at the crime scene photos she’d received when she was packing. They were gruesome, and it was her mother. She had to be devastated.

But she just nodded firmly. “Yes. I want to do this. I want us to write this book, do everything in our power to either solve the crimes, or at the very least to show the advances in criminal investigation.” She adjusted the straps of her tank top, her hair smoothed back and contained in a twisted ponytail of some kind. “I believe in forensics. I’ve always enjoyed the satisfaction in my job of taking an unknown substance and identifying it. Giving the investigators the facts they need to connect the pieces of the puzzle and convict a criminal. Maybe you and I can’t achieve that here, but we can try, and regardless of the outcome, when we write ‘The End’ and you turn the manuscript in to your editor, I’m going to have gained some sort of personal closure. That’s what I want. To be done. To move forward.”

If it were only that simple. Gabriel had often wondered if closure was a psychological myth. Nothing ended, ever. Things simply faded, hurt less, but stuck to the side of your subconscious forever, altering your thoughts, your essence, your future.