“Finn!” she shouted, but her brother didn’t react.

Stride pointed behind Finn, gesturing toward Rikke. When Finn didn’t move, Stride took two careful steps backward, giving him space. He pointed and gestured again. Finally, with a painful flick of his head, Finn turned and saw his sister.

“Everybody stay where you are,” Stride called.

Finn swung the barrel of the gun to his left, and Stride understood. Finn wanted him and Rikke both in his line of sight. Stride debated standing still, but then took slow sideways steps down the beach until Finn could watch the two of them without turning his head.

Rikke’s eyes were locked on Finn. When she took a step toward him, Finn immediately raised the Glock and jammed the barrel into the side of his own head. His finger was tight on the trigger.

“Easy,” Stride told her.

“This is between him and me, Lieutenant,” Rikke said. She took another step, and Finn shook his head violently and shoved the barrel harder against his skin.

“He’s not kidding,” Stride warned her.

“I know what he needs,” Rikke said.

Her fingers came together, meeting at the first button on her shirt, which she undid. Finn’s eyes followed, wide and staring. She separated another button and pulled the flaps of her shirt apart, revealing a V of white skin. Finn inhaled loudly through his nose. His entire body trembled, as if he were wracked with chills. His mouth fell open, and he drew the gun slowly away from his head.

“I’m sorry for what she did to us,” Rikke told Finn. “I’m sorry for what we became.”

Rikke detached the rest of the buttons, letting the flaps dangle, and then used her fingernails to push the collar back off her shoulders until the shirt slid off her arms and fluttered to the ground. Her stomach bulged over the waist of her shorts. Her left breast drooped like an underfilled water balloon, its nipple flat and pale pink. Her other breast was a wrinkled cross of scars.

She sank to her knees and spread her arms wide, beckoning Finn to her bare skin. She was crying. He was crying. Finn made a mewling noise like a trapped kitten and sloughed his body toward her.

They were almost touching when another wrenching, involuntary spasm shuddered through his body. His finger twitched on the trigger.

The gun was still pointed at the meat of his skull.

Finn’s expression turned to glass as the bullet tunneled through his brain. Fire and noise cracked open the beach. Rikke wailed, and Stride saw one last flashback of Ray Wallace’s face before he was jolted back to the present, where Finn slumped forward, lifeless and free.

PART FIVE
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Fear of Heights

46
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Serena stood apart from the cluster of mourners while they prepared to bury Finn Mathisen in the Riverside Cemetery. She tugged her trench coat tighter. Her black hair swished around her face. They were beyond the southern edge of Superior, out past the railroad tracks and landfill, in sloping fields dotted with pines whose branches reached for the gray sky like praying angels. Water gurgled over stones in a creek beside the path. The lawn was lush and neatly trimmed.