Sophie and I live together now in a two-bedroom apartment just down the street from Mrs. Ennis. We’ve never returned to the old house; I sold it in about three hours, because even if it was once a crime scene, it still has one of the largest yards in Boston.

Sophie does not ask for Brian, nor speak of him. Nor does she talk about the kidnapping. I believe she feels she’s protecting me. What can I tell you—she’s a chip off the old block. She sees a specialist once a week. He advises me to be patient and so I am. I view my job now as building a safe place to land for when my daughter inevitably lets go.

She will fall, and I will catch her. Gladly.

I made Brian’s funeral arrangements alone. He’s buried with a simple granite marker bearing his name and relevant dates. And maybe it was weakness on my part, but given that he died for Sophie, that he knew, standing there in our kitchen, the decision I would have to make, I added one last word. The highest praise you can give a man. I had etched, under his name: Daddy.

Maybe someday Sophie will visit him. And maybe, seeing that word, she can remember his love and she can forgive his mistakes. Parents aren’t perfect, you know. We’re all just doing the best we can.

I had to resign from the state police. While D.D. and Bobby have yet to connect me to Shane Lyons’s or John Stephen Purcell’s deaths, there’s still the small matter of me breaking out of jail and assaulting a fellow officer. My lawyer is arguing that I was operating under extreme emotional duress, given my superior officer’s kidnapping of my child, and should not be held responsible for my actions. Cargill remains optimistic that the DA, wanting to avoid too much bad publicity for the state police, will agree to a plea where I serve a probationary sentence, or at worse, house arrest.

Either way, I understand my days as a police officer are over. Frankly, a woman who’s done the things I’ve done shouldn’t be an armed protector of the public. And I don’t know—maybe there is something wrong with me, an essential boundary missing, so that where other mothers would’ve cried for their child, I armed myself to the teeth and hunted down the people who took her instead.

Sometimes, I’m scared by the image that greets me in the mirror. My face is too hard, and even I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve smiled. Men don’t ask me out. Strangers don’t strike up conversations with me on the subway.