“So that’s your mission?” He felt a strange guilt that she was determined to research and ferret out facts about him, the man sitting straight across from her, the man she had slept in the same bed with the night before. He had offered her comfort then, and he had enjoyed that. The closeness, the sense of just being with another person. It was wrong to let her traverse down a path that would result in a dead end, wasting her time. He knew all the answers she wanted. Yet he couldn’t give them. She would never believe he was immortal, never understand his punishment.

“I think it is. That feels like the logical place to start to me, since there are no other suspects. What about you? How do you piece this book together? You said you start with the crime, then scene set. Then what?”

“The principal players. Which are John Thiroux, who you are handling, Anne Donovan, and absinthe. The autopsy suggested she’d had a child . . . did it survive? What happened to it? Did Anne have enemies? A husband or boyfriend she’d left before becoming a prostitute? And I want to know if absinthe is psychoactive. I can’t explain exactly the process of how I lay out a book . . . it’s logical to me, but I can’t really explain it.” He followed the story, wrote it like a story, albeit with facts. But that was normally, when he wasn’t personally involved. Anne’s story was different, and he wasn’t unbiased. He had a desperate stake in the outcome, an intense need, or maybe hope, to solve it, to give Anne justice and to right the wrong. He also wanted closure for Sara, in some way, with her own mother’s case.

Sara tapped her finger on her bottom lip. She had gone home after they’d woken up, and Gabriel had doubted whether she would actually come back that day or not. She had looked embarrassed, had acted uncomfortable when the morning arrived and they were sharing a bed. But after breakfast and a shower, she had come back with her cat, and had attacked his stacks of research documents tenaciously.

“I guess I’m just going to have to trust you to write it.” She smiled at him. “Since it is your book, after all. But you know what’s bugging me? If Anne was a prostitute, don’t you think it’s odd that there was no evidence of sexual intercourse? I mean, wouldn’t they have had sex when Thiroux got there? I don’t think he was paying her to chat with him.”