Her thoughts, tentative at first, sped up. Finally racing along, racing toward a completely unexpected conclusion.

But it wasn’t possible. Was it?

She swallowed.

*   *   *

Perhaps the only good thing about the torment he experienced, thought Gamache, taking a deep breath of the sweet morning air, was that once it was gone he emerged into this.

He smiled at the sight of the stone and clapboard and brick cottages, radiating in circles from the village green.

And when the hell stopped, when he finally banished his demons, would heaven stop too?

Would he love this place less because he needed it less?

Again he looked at Three Pines, the little village lost in the valley, and felt the familiar lifting of his heart. But would it lift if there was no load?

Was the final fear that, in losing his fears, he would also lose his joy?

He’d been so worried about Jean-Guy and his addictions, what about his own? He wasn’t addicted to pain, to panic, but he might be addicted to the bliss of having them stop.

The mind, he knew, really was its own place. Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Gamache was pretty sure that’s what Peter Morrow had done. He’d turned heaven into hell. And as a result, he’d been kicked out. Paradise Lost.

But Peter Morrow wasn’t Lucifer, the fallen angel. He was just a troubled man who lived in his head, not realizing that Paradise was only ever found in the heart. Unfortunately for Peter, feelings lived there too. And they were almost always messy. Peter Morrow did not like messes.

Armand laughed as he remembered the conversation from the night before.

It was how Clara had described her first attempt at a painting. No, not a mess, it was something else. A dog’s breakfast. Ruth had called it that and Clara had agreed. Ruth tried to capture feelings in her poetry. Clara tried with color and subject to give form to feelings.

It was messy. Unruly. Risky. Scary. So much could go wrong. Failure was always close at hand. But so was brilliance.

Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter’s landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.

How shattering it must have been, then, to have played it safe all his life and been expelled anyway. From home. From his career.

What would a person do when the tried-and-true was no longer true?