“The worst is done, Armand,” she said, once they reached her car. “And now it’s time for the best, the fun part. Rebuilding. Don’t you want to be part of that? Or is this,” she looked around the village green, “enough?”

She saw the old homes circling the green. She saw the bistro and bookstore and bakery and general store. She saw, Gamache knew, a pretty, but dull, backwater. While he saw a shore. A place where the shipwrecked could finally rest.

Armand had told Reine-Marie about the job offer, of course, and they’d discussed it.

“Do you want to do it, Armand?” she’d asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.

But he knew her too well for that.

“It’s too soon, I think. For both of us. But Thérèse has raised an interesting question. What next?”

Next? Reine-Marie had thought when he’d said it a week ago. And she thought it again now, in the bistro, with the murmur of conversation, like a stream, flowing by her, around her. That one bedraggled word had washed up on her banks and set down roots, tendrils. A bindweed of a word.

Next.

When Armand had retired and they’d moved from Montréal to Three Pines, it had never occurred to her there’d be a next. She was still surprised and elated that there was a now.

But now had bled into next.

Armand wasn’t yet sixty, and she herself had given up a hugely successful career at the Bibliothèque nationale.

Next.

She was, truth be told, still savoring here and still savoring now. But next was on the horizon, slouching toward them.

“Hello, you still here?”

Gabri, large and voluble, walked across the bistro he owned with his partner, Olivier. He hugged Isabelle Lacoste.

“I thought you’d be gone by now,” said Myrna, arriving with him and taking the slender woman in her ample arms.

“Soon. I was just at your bookstore,” Isabelle said to Myrna. “You weren’t there so I left the money by the cash register.”

“You found a book?” asked Myrna. “Which one?”

They discussed books while Gabri got them a couple of beers and chatted with customers before returning to the table. In his late thirties, Gabri’s dark hair was just beginning to gray, and his face was showing crinkles when he laughed, which was often.

“How was rehearsal?” Reine-Marie asked Gabri and Myrna. “Is the play going well?”

“You’ll have to ask Antoinette,” said Gabri, indicating with his beer a middle-aged woman at another table.

“Who is she?” asked Isabelle.