Perhaps the most amazing thing was, in the last year he’d actually lost some weight. He’d been about two-eighty fourteen months ago, but was now down to two hundred and thirty-three pounds. According to his calculations, that was forty-seven pounds. For a while he’d been putting new holes in his belt and just drawing his regular pants on tighter, but his wife, Maureen, said he was starting to look ridiculous. She’d dragged him to the men’s shop, like he was five years old or something, and bought him some new clothes.

But he’d kept his old ones in the closet. Just in case. There might come a time when he once again found the temptations of Dunkin’ Donuts too great to resist.

It had been some time since he’d had one of those.

And he wasn’t going to lie. He missed them. But he liked being alive, and healthier, even more.

Maureen had been tremendously supportive. She’d already been trying to get him to change his eating habits. Immediately after the incident, she was so happy he wasn’t dead that she spoiled him with homemade cakes and pies—no one made a lemon meringue pie like Maureen—but it was Barry who told her to stop. He’d made up his mind, he told her. He was going to take charge of his health. He was going to look after himself.

Which explained the banana sitting on his desk. The brown banana, which had been there since yesterday.

While Barry Duckworth knew what he wanted to do where his health was concerned, he was less sure about his career. It was in his role as a police detective that he had nearly died.

He wondered whether he should do something else. The trouble was, he didn’t know what else to do.

He’d been a cop more than twenty years. It wasn’t like he could go back to school at this stage and become a dentist. Okay, maybe not a dentist. He didn’t understand why anyone would want to become a dentist. He’d rather attend a hundred murder scenes than have to stick his fingers into someone’s mouth. But an accountant, now there was a nice, safe job. No one beat your face to a pulp for being an accountant.

While Duckworth coped with the fallout of nearly losing his life, the town itself was struggling to return to normal. Hundreds of Promise Falls’ finest—and some not so fine—had died in a catastrophe the year before. People had never stopped talking about what happened, but now you could go an entire day, sometimes even two, without someone bringing it up.

The out-of-towners were the real problem. It was, on a much smaller scale of course, a bit like after the Twin Towers came down, when tourists wanted their picture taken at Ground Zero. This upstate New York locale had become the poster town for revenge, and almost daily someone could be spotted taking a selfie by the “Welcome to Promise Falls” sign.

Duckworth leaned back in his office chair, keeping his eye on the door to the detectives’ room. It opened and a man stood there, staring in, a look of bewilderment on his face.