Sara slept for fourteen hours. She couldn’t believe it. She’d been out cold from 5 p.m. to 7 the next morning. When she’d woken up, Gabriel had been sitting up in bed next to her reading the newspaper. Which meant not only had she slept, she had slept through his getting in and out of bed, possibly several times.

It felt like a major accomplishment. A triumph.

Then she and Gabriel had spent the day walking around the Quarter, playing tourist. The history he knew amazed her. He seemed to have a story, a thought, a reference for every street and nearly every building. He talked about the Pontalba, the Cabildo, the Creole ballroom on Orleans Street. But he never told the story she wanted to hear, which was that of his girlfriend.

She wouldn’t pry, but she wanted to know. Wanted him to trust her with his hurt, his guilt. But he never said anything.

Instead he just occasionally smiled at her and told her anecdotes about people long dead, and while it was entertaining, intriguing, it struck Sara that everything she and Gabriel did and talked about was driven by the dead.

It was an eerie thought.

When they sat down on the steps in front of the Mississippi River, the sun beating down on their backs, Sara knew they needed to finish their business with the dead, and move forward as the living. There were no answers. There had never been answers. There never would be definitive answers. It only was speculation and isolated facts.

“What do you want to do about the case?” she asked, leaning forward onto her knees. “I can give you a DNA sample for comparison to Anne Donovan’s. If we want rush results, I can overnight everything to my friend Jocelyn. She can do it in the lab after hours in a day or two.”

Maybe she should even go back to Florida herself for a few days. She did want to see Rafe before he left for the West Coast.

Strangely enough, she wasn’t feeling the fear anymore. The pictures, the newspaper article her mother had received, the absinthe bottle—it was all disturbing, and not her imagination. Someone was watching her. Someone who knew something. Possibly a murderer. Yet she felt like she had reached the bottom of the depths of her fear, had seen the worst, had lived with fear for so long that it no longer had the power to paralyze her.

Instead she felt a strange sort of calm, an acceptance.

Maybe it was getting a full night’s sleep.

Maybe it was looking at the horrific possibilities of all that could happen and realizing she couldn’t control the future, only her now.