Four months ago, we’d begun to come back together in her bedroom on Howes Street, and it had been beautiful, achingly so, as if the sole purpose of my life had been to reach that bed, that woman, that moment in time. And then Evandro Arujo and Gerry Glynn had slaughtered a twenty-four-year-old cop on their way through Angie’s front door and put a bullet in her abdomen.

She got Evandro back, though, fired three big fuck-yous into his body, left him kneeling on her kitchen floor, trying to touch a piece of his head that wasn’t there any longer.

And Phil and I and a cop named Oscar took down Gerry Glynn as Angie lay in ICU. Oscar and I walked away. But not Phil. Not Gerry Glynn, either, but I’m not sure that was much of a consolation prize for Angie.

Human psyches, I knew as I watched her brow furrow and her lips part slightly against the pillow, are so much harder to bandage than human flesh. And thousands of years of study and experience have made it easier to heal the body, but no one has gotten much past square one on the human mind.

When Phil died, his dying swam deep into Angie’s mind, happened over and over and over again without stop. Loss and grief and everything that tortured Desiree Stone tortured Angie, too.

And just as Trevor had discovered with his daughter, I looked at Angie and knew there was very little I could do about it until the cycle of pain ran itself down, and melted like the snow.

9

Richie Colgan claims his ancestors are from Nigeria, but I’m not sure I believe him. Given his sense of revenge, I’d be willing to swear he’s half Sicilian.

He woke me at seven in the morning by throwing snowballs at my window until the sound reached my dreams and I was yanked from a walk in the French countryside with Emmanuelle Beart and thrown into a muddy foxhole where the enemy was inexplicably catapulting grapefruits into our midst.

I sat up in bed and watched a hunk of wet snow splat into my windowpane. At first, I was happy it wasn’t a grapefruit; then my head cleared and I walked over and saw Richie standing below.

The miserable bastard waved to me.

“Grief Release, Incorporated,” Richie said as he sat at my kitchen table, “is one interesting organization.”

“How interesting?”

“Enough that when I woke my editor up two hours ago, he agreed to give me two weeks off from my column to research them and a five-day, front-page, lower-right-corner feature series if I come up with what I think I will.”

“And what do you think you’ll come up with?” Angie said. She glared at him over her cup of coffee, her face puffy and hair hanging in her eyes, not at all happy to greet the day.