BY THE TIME WE GOT TO THE RANGER STATION, THE RAIN HAD thinned to drizzle. Fog on the Tamassee’s surface smoldered like a doused fire. The air was cool, and I was glad I’d packed a sweatshirt. The calendar might say it was May, but it seemed more like October, the kind of morning I’d always enjoyed on the river, because everything, even the water, was always quieter. On those mornings the fog felt like a countercurrent, moving opposite the earth’s rotation to hold everything, even time, in abeyance. I hoped, if Mrs. Kowalsky was somehow right, that this was what her daughter’s soul now felt. Not fear or loneliness but a sense of being one with something transcendently beautiful.

“Why the wry smile?” Allen asked, taking my hand.

“A realization that at least in spirit I’m still one of Luke’s followers.”

“He’s not the only person who cares about that river,” Allen said, and there was irritation in his voice.

I squeezed his hand.

“I know that. I’m just saying that if you spend enough time on the Tamassee you can’t help but believe a lot of what Luke believes.”

Allen freed his hand from mine. “But you don’t regret taking the photo?” he asked.

A part of me wanted to answer no and leave it at that, because things were going well between us, too well to let something already done create a problem. But I couldn’t do that.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid I do.”

Anger sparked and caught in Allen’s eyes. “And I’m responsible for setting up that photograph, right? That’s what you said in my office.”

“I could have left it in the darkroom. It was my decision to give it to Lee.”

I paused as a camera crew from a Greenville TV station passed. Billy walked toward us, saw our faces, and quickly changed direction.

“So even after last night’s meeting you still want Ruth Kowalsky’s body to stay in that river?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want that. But I don’t want the river damaged either. Luke’s right about what can happen when a precedent is set.”

“And you’d feel that way even if it were your child in that river? You’re like Luke that way as well?”

“I don’t know what I’d feel,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” Allen said. “But Ellen Kowalsky knows. It’s not some abstraction she can look at with detachment.”

Nor can you, I thought. Maybe none of us can be detached.

“It’s done,” I said. “I don’t want us to fight about this.”