“One of Myrna’s?” Clara asked.

“Non.” He examined her. “Do you want to talk about Peter?”

“No.”

The Paris Peace Conference had hit a stalemate. He sipped his coffee. The morning mist had almost burned away and the forest spread green as far as he could see. These were old-growth trees, not yet discovered and felled by the lumber industry.

“You never finish the book,” she said. “Is it difficult to read?”

“For me, yes.”

She was quiet for a moment. “When Peter left, I was sure he’d come back. I was the one who forced the issue, you know. He didn’t want to go.” She lowered her head and studied her hands. As hard as she scrubbed, she couldn’t seem to get the paint out of her cuticles. It was as though the paint was part of her. Had fused there. “And now, he doesn’t want to come home.”

“Do you want him back?”

“I don’t know. I won’t know until I see him, I think.” She looked at the book just poking out of his pocket. “Why’s it so difficult for you to read? It’s in English, but I know you read English as well as French.”

“C’est vrai. The words I understand, it’s the emotions in the book that I struggle with. Where it takes me. I find I need to tread carefully.”

Clara looked at him full on. “Are you all right?”

He smiled. “Are you?”

Clara pushed her large hands through her hair, leaving croissant flakes behind. “May I see it?”

Gamache hesitated, then tugged the book out of his pocket and gave it to her, watching closely, his body suddenly taut as though he’d handed her a loaded gun.

It was a slender hardback, the cover worn. She turned it over.

“There is a balm in Gilead,” she read from the back, “to make the wounded whole—”

“There’s power enough in Heaven / To cure a sin-sick soul.” Armand Gamache finished the phrase. “It’s from an old spiritual.”

Clara stared at the back cover. “Do you believe it, Armand?”

“Yes.” He took the book from her and grasped it so tightly in one hand she half expected words to squeeze out.

“Then what are you struggling with?”

When he didn’t answer, she had her answer.

The problem wasn’t with the words, it was with the wounds. Old wounds. And maybe a sin-sick soul.

“Where’s Peter?” she asked. “What’s happened to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you know him. Is he the sort to just disappear?”

Gamache knew the answer to that, had known since the day before when Clara had brought her problem to him.

“No.”

“So what happened to him?” she pleaded, searching his face. “What do you think?”

What could he say? What should he say? That Peter Morrow would have come home if he could? That for all his faults, Peter was a man of his word, and if he couldn’t for some reason show up in person he’d have called, or emailed, or written a letter.