The hot shower felt like a dream, soothing his muscles and easing the tension in his chest. The cut in his side, which had been quiet since the EMT cleaned it at the sheriff’s office, woke up as the soapy water seeped through the bandage, but even that couldn’t diminish the sense of peace.

Max closed his eyes and held his face to the stream. He had confessed at last, revealing his true self to Niki—a murderer, the kind of man she hunted. And if she chose to hunt him, he would gladly surrender. She could take his confession to a grand jury or she could keep his secret; it didn’t matter. He was willing to face what he’d done.

Max tipped his head against the shower wall to listen for Niki leaving, but all he could hear was the water beating against the fiberglass. When he finally toweled himself dry, he slipped into a pair of flannel pajama bottoms left on the floor days earlier and the bathrobe that he kept on the door hook.

Before leaving the bathroom, he wiped steam from the mirror and looked at himself. It was the first time in three and a half years that he held his own gaze. Maybe it was because he wasn’t looking for the man he used to be—or the man he thought he’d been. He was looking at a man who was flawed, but honest about the darkness inside. He was looking at a man he could live with.

As he turned the knob he wondered what lay on the other side. Did he want to see an empty room? How could he expect anything less? Yet deep down, he hoped to see her there, waiting. He ached to hold her and tell her how all those years of working beside her—denying what he had felt—had been a mistake.

Max opened the door to darkness, except for what little light spilled in from the sixty-watt bulb out on the porch.

CHAPTER 78

The pale light threw shadows across the floor, shadows that crawled onto the empty couch. Niki was gone.

When Max was a child, his stepmom had told him that, sometimes, you can’t fully appreciate a thing until you know what it’s like to lose it. She said that “the absence of someone truly special will leave a hole in your heart that you can feel every time you take a breath.” Max wanted to be happy that Niki was gone. She had made the right decision. Still, her absence made him want to fold in upon himself. In all those years of exile, he had never felt so alone.

Then Niki spoke. “It’s snowing,” she said.

She stood near the glass door, leaning against the wall, her face turned to watch the tiny snowflakes gathering on the other side of the glass.

“Niki. I thought… you left.”

“I almost did.” She sounded mournful as she stared out into the night.

“What changed your mind?”

Niki turned to face Max, her eyes soft and kind. “Why didn’t you kill Reed Harris?”