51
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When Stride saw the glass door open, he realized that the woman who had stepped out onto the restaurant patio was his late wife, Cindy.

For an instant, he felt as if he were falling again, long and hard toward the water. The enigmatic smile he remembered from years ago was the same. When she lifted her sunglasses, her brown eyes stared back at him with a familiar glint over the heads of the others in the restaurant.

It wasn’t her, of course. It was Tish.

She joined them at the same table where she had met them for the first time three months earlier. Stride sat with Serena and Maggie on either side of him. The heat of summer had yielded to September evenings, when darkness ate away the daylight. As he watched, the last sliver of sun dipped below the western hillside, and the lake grew gray and unsettled. Tish shivered as she sat down.

“How are you?” Stride asked her.

Tish sized up his condition. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Stride’s right leg was encased in a cast. His crutches were balanced against the railing of the patio. He fingered the brace on his neck. “Physical wounds heal,” he said. “Yours may be a little harder to deal with.”

Tish put on a brave face and smiled. “You know how they say you have to face your fears to overcome them? That’s a load of crap. I never want to cross a bridge again in my entire life.” She reached out and took Stride’s and Serena’s hands. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you both properly. I should be dead now. You saved me.”

“It’s over,” Stride said. “Try not to think about it anymore.”

It wasn’t really over, though, not for any of them. Serena had nightmares where she relived his fall from the bridge. She would wake up in a sweat and hold on to him. For himself, he was surprised and a little anxious that he had felt no emotional response to his own near-death experience. He felt strangely empty, as if the fall had happened to someone else. He feared that the emotions would build silently like an avalanche and someday overtake him with a roar.

“Seriously, how are you?” Tish asked him.

“It’s going to take me a few months to fully recover,” he admitted. “The doctors don’t want me to come back until the end of the year, but I’m not going to wait that long.”

Maggie winked. “I’m the interim head of the Detective Bureau. He’s afraid I’ll take over.”

“Be my guest,” Stride said.

“I already gave away your chair,” Maggie told him. “It was too big for my ass.”

“Go away, Mags.”

She laughed.

“Did you finish the book?” Stride asked Tish.

“I’m on the last chapter.” Tish tugged nervously at her hair. “I feel guilty writing it. Like it was partly my fault. I drove Laura into Rikke’s arms back then.”

Stride shook his head. “Rikke knew how to manipulate young girls. She was responsible, not you.”