The EMTs wouldn’t let Sophie remain on the gurney. Tessa required immediate medical attention and the child would only be in the way. After thirty seconds of negotiation, it was determined that Sophie would ride in the front of the ambulance, while her mother was tended in the back. The EMTs, moving quickly, started to hustle the girl to the front.

She twisted around them long enough to race back to her mother, and tuck something beside her, then ran for the passenger’s seat.

When D.D. looked again, Sophie’s one-eyed doll was tucked beside Tessa’s unmoving form. The EMTs loaded her up.

The ambulance whisked them away.

D.D. stood in the middle of the snowy dawn, hand on her own stomach. She smelled smoke. She tasted tears.

She looked up to the woods, where a fire was now burning down to ash. Hamilton’s last bid attempt to cover his tracks, which had cost both him and his female companion their lives.

D.D. wanted to feel triumphant. They’d saved the girl, they’d vanquished the evil foe. Now, except for a few days of excruciating paperwork, they should be riding off in the sunset.

It wasn’t enough.

For the first time in a dozen years, D. D. Warren had reached the successful conclusion of a case, and it wasn’t enough. She didn’t feel like reporting the good news to her superiors, or supplying self-gratifying answers to the press, or even grabbing a couple of beers to wind down with her taskforce.

She wanted to go home. She wanted to curl up with Alex and inhale the scent of his aftershave, and feel the familiar comfort of his arms around her. And she wanted, heaven help her, to still be at his side the first time the baby moved, and be looking into his eyes when the first contraction hit, and be holding his hand when their baby slid into the world.

She wanted a little girl or a little boy who would love her as much as Sophie Leoni obviously loved her mother. And she wanted to return that love tenfold, to feel it grow bigger and bigger every single year, just as Tessa had said.

D.D. wanted a family.

She had to wait ten hours. Bobby couldn’t work—having used deadly force, he was forced to sit on the sidelines and await the arrival of the firearms discharge investigation team, which would formally investigate the incident. Meaning D.D. was on her own as she notified her boss of the latest developments, then secured the scene and began processing the outer fringes, while waiting for the last embers of the fire to cool. More officers and evidence techs arrived. More questions to answer, more bodies to manage.

She worked through breakfast. Bobby brought her yogurt and a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. She worked. She smelled of smoke and sweat, of blood and ash.