“Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s get you to the car. Time for a little rest, D.D. It’s going to be okay. Really. It will be.”

He took her hand, pulling her through the woods. She trod dispiritedly behind him, thinking that he was a liar. That once you saw the body of a little girl blow up in front of your eyes, the world was never okay again.

They should head for HQ, get out before the rural road became impassable. She needed to prepare for the inevitable press conference. Good news, we probably found the body of Sophie Leoni. Bad news, we lost her mother, a distinguished state police officer who most likely murdered her entire family.

They reached the car. Bobby opened the passenger-side door. She slid in, feeling jumbled and restless and almost desperate to escape her own skin. She didn’t want to be a detective anymore. Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hadn’t gotten her man. Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren hadn’t rescued the child. Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren was about to become a mother herself, and look at Tessa Leoni, trooper extraordinaire who’d killed, buried, and then blown up her own kid, and what did that say about female police officers becoming parental units, and what the hell was D.D. thinking?

She shouldn’t be pregnant. She wasn’t strong enough. Her tough veneer was cracking and beneath it was simply a vast well of sadness. All the dead bodies she’d studied through the years. Other children who’d never made it home. The unrepentant faces of parents, uncles, grandparents, even next door neighbors who’d done the deed.

The world was a terrible place. She solved each murder only to move on to the next. Put away a child abuser, watch a wife beater get released the next day. And on and on it went. D.D., sentenced to spend the rest of her career roaming backwoods for small lifeless bodies who’d never been loved or wanted in the first place.

She’d just wanted to bring Sophie home. Rescue this one child. Make this one drop of difference in the universe, and now … Now …

“Shhh.” Bobby was stroking her hair.

Was she crying? Maybe, but it wasn’t enough. She pressed her tearstained cheek into the curve of his shoulder. Felt the shuddering heat of him. Her lips found his neck, tasting salt. Then it seemed the most natural thing in the world to lean back and find his lips with her own. He didn’t pull back. Instead, she felt his hands grip her shoulders. So she kissed him again, the man who’d once been her lover and one of the few people she regarded as a pillar of strength.

Time suspended, a heartbeat or two when she didn’t have to think, she only had to feel.