More times than not, I set aside the perpetual pile of crap that comes with being a mayor and sit pondering the chain of events that brought me to this pass. It’s true that Caitlin let her ambition drive her to a cursed place she should never have gone alone, and she died for it. But had my father not hidden the truth of what transpired on the night Viola Turner died, Caitlin would never have become obsessed with Henry Sexton’s quest, or picked up his torch after he martyred himself to save us, or followed a bloody trail to the abomination called the Bone Tree.

She would be alive.

We would be living with Annie in Edelweiss, our dream house overlooking the river, and well on our way to giving Annie a brother. That thought haunts me, probably more than it should. The night before Caitlin was killed, we made love in that house for the first and last time: a desperate attempt on her part to calm me down after a standoff with a corrupt sheriff. I had no idea then that Caitlin was pregnant. Forrest Knox told me later, as a torment, and the autopsy confirmed his revelation. Had I foreseen the doom we were racing toward on that last night, I would have locked the door of Edelweiss and held her inside until . . . what? It’s pointless to speculate. Somehow, I sense, no matter what I did that night, Caitlin would still have died, and Annie and I would still have wound up here. Which is . . . where?

Lost.

When someone you love is murdered, you learn things about yourself you’d give a great deal not to know. If you kill the person who robbed you of that life, you discover that vengeance can’t begin to fill the fulminating void that murder leaves behind. Nothing can, except years of living, and then only if you’re lucky. Annie and I learned that the first time, when cancer took her mother.

Caitlin was our luck.

Nine weeks ago, our luck ran out. Caitlin’s murder hit us like an artillery shell from a clear blue sky. And the first thing blown apart by that kind of shell is time. Day and night lose their meaning. The passage of moments and hours wobbles out of kilter. Clock faces trigger confusion, even panic. In the demi-world of mourning, one’s sense of selfhood begins to unravel. The strong find ways to re-orient themselves to the superimposed temporal structure observed by the rest of the world, but no matter how hard I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to do that.