So maybe the Benners could tell him how they did it. How they lasted. Or just how to make it that one more week.

Whether or not he’d even summon the strength to knock on their door remained to be seen. All he knew was some invisible and indefinable source had told him to come here. Whatever unfolded would be unplanned, as were the best and worst things that happen to anyone.

As he neared their house, his attention was drawn to the curb at the end of the Benners’ driveway. A Suburban idled in front of the house, its exhaust rising into the air like ghosts escaping into the wild.

Colin slowed, squinted his eyes. Focused on the license plate.

He knew that plate. Knew it by heart.

It was the car Rose Yates drove. Registered to Logan Yates.

“Holy hell,” Colin said, crouching over his steering wheel.

He pulled up alongside the Suburban. Through his snow-streaked tinted window, he saw her.

Rose Yates.

Parked in front of the Benners’ house.

Colin had been so sure something was going to happen today. And whatever that something was, it was going to happen now.

Right now.

He rolled down his window.

Sixty-Six

I roll my window down, because what else is there to do?

I don’t have to explain anything. I’m not doing anything wrong. I don’t have to say a word.

But I want to tell him everything.

“Detective Pearson,” I say. I try to say it with the ease of meeting an old friend, but I can barely hear my words over the sound of the blood pumping through my head.

“Rose,” he says.

“You’re back.”

“I am.”

“Are you following me?”

He shakes his head. “No. I believe this is one of those strange moments in life when things just line up.”

“Do you believe in such things?”

“I do now,” he says.

He’s a hundred years older than when I last saw him, and it’s not just the heavy weariness on his face. It’s his soul. His energy. It’s 10 percent of what I saw just a month ago, an EKG close to flatlining.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” I say. “And your…your baby.”

“Thank you.”

There’s nothing thankful about any of this.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

He thinks about this a moment, taking his time. “Well, I suppose I came to see you. And then, in the moment, I thought I’d come to see them.” He nods at the house. “But I guess I’m really just doing what you did. Running away after tragedy. Back to Bury.”

Back to Bury. How that phrase hits me in the moment. I did come here to bury things, mostly my past. But the past doesn’t lie six feet underground. It’s a zombie, relentless in its need to feast.

“I’m not running away,” I say. “I’m going back to Milwaukee. Driving there today.”

“That so?”

“It is.”

“Still, we should talk. Long as I’m here.”

I look back at Max, who’s staring at me with wide eyes. The back windows of the Suburban are tinted so dark I doubt Pearson even sees my son.