Gamache smiled. “I didn’t believe her, of course. Until I came here myself.”

He looked across, at the shoreline. Barren. Without a sign of life.

But he knew that wasn’t true. Lots of things lived here. Unseen.

“I’d love to draw it,” she said. “If this ever calms.”

“I envy you your art,” he said. “It must be therapeutic.”

They lurched back to the bench.

“You think I need therapy?”

“I think everyone on this boat probably does.”

She laughed. “The Voyage of the Demented.”

Clara watched as Gamache reached into the innermost pocket of his coat. And brought out The Balm in Gilead.

“I found this by my father’s bedside,” he said, looking down at it. “When I was nine years old. The night my parents died. I was inconsolable. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I always did when I was frightened. I went into their bedroom. And I crawled into bed. And I waited for the nightmare to be over. To wake up, and there they’d be. On either side of me. Protecting me. But of course, there was no sleep and there was no waking.”

He paused, to gather himself. Wave after wave pounded the windows in front of them, as though the river was throwing itself against it on purpose. Trying to get in. Trying to get at them. Trying, perhaps, to shelter from its own storm.

“They’d been killed in a car accident. But not just an accident though, I learned later. When I first joined the Sûreté I looked up their file. I don’t know why.”

“You needed to know,” said Clara. “It’s natural.”

“A lot of things are natural, but not good. Like asbestos. This was like asbestos. It burrowed into me. I wish now I hadn’t looked. My grandmother hadn’t told me that my parents had been killed by a drunk driver. He survived, of course.”

Clara looked at Gamache. Over the years she’d heard many things in his voice. Tenderness, wonder, rage, disappointment. Warning. But never bitterness. Until now.

“Anyway,” he said, as though what he’d just told her was trivial, “I found this book on my father’s bedside table. The bookmark exactly where he left it. I took it and put it in a box with other things.”

Treasures from childhood. Old keys to old homes he no longer lived in. Pennants from races won. A particularly fine chestnut. A piece of wood someone assured him was from Jean Béliveau’s hockey stick. Relics from the saints of childhood. Talismans.

He’d been given the crucifix his father always wore, and had been wearing when he died. They’d wanted to bury him with it, but his grandmother had retrieved it, Armand didn’t know how and never asked.

She’d given it to him when his first child, Daniel, had been born.