When she’d started the search there’d been an element of guilt. Of responsibility. She’d wanted to find him, she wanted him to be safe. But she hadn’t been sure she wanted him back.

But the more they discovered about Peter now, the more desperate she was to meet this man. To get to know him. And have him meet her, for the first time.

Clara realized she was falling in love. She’d always loved Peter, but this was something else. Some deeper vein.

“It doesn’t matter what we believe,” said Myrna, joining them to stare at the picture. “What matters is what Peter believed he saw.”

They looked from the table over to the paintings on the wall.

One was now quite clear. The waves of red lips. Frowning. Moaning. Sighing.

They’d turned the other two paintings around as well, but those had yet to give up their secrets.

“Should we go to Dumfries?” Clara asked. “See for ourselves? Talk to this Alphonse?”

“Non,” said Armand. “Whatever happened there is in the past. Both Peter and time have moved on. We’re going there.”

He pointed to the river of sighs.

To a place Gamache knew well. It was in Québec but not of Québec. This area was unique in the world, having been created hundreds of millions of years earlier, by a catastrophe. A cosmic catastrophe.

*   *   *

Gamache, Jean-Guy, and Reine-Marie stood at the large map of Québec tacked up on their sitting room wall.

How often, Beauvoir wondered, had they stood in front of this very map when it had been in the Gamaches’ Montréal home, plotting the best way to get to a crime scene? A body. A murder.

He hoped that wasn’t what they’d find at the end of this journey too.

But the silence from Peter was ominous, and the sooner they could get there the better. And at least now they knew where “there” was.

The Chief’s finger traced a line from Three Pines, near the Vermont border, up to Autoroute 20. Along to Quebec City, then over the bridge, skirting the city, and up again.

Up, up along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. Traveling northeast.

To their destination in the Charlevoix region.

“Is that the best route?”

As the men discussed various options, Reine-Marie stared at the dot on the map. How often had she stood in front of this very map, staring at a dot? Imagining Armand inside it. Willing him safe, willing him home.

The dot had a name. Baie-Saint-Paul.

Saint Paul. Another one who’d seen something unlikely on the road. And whose life had changed.

“We’re on the road to Damascus,” said Armand with a smile. “Or Charlevoix anyway.”