According to Gilbert Gurion, the FBI had estimated that it would have taken a team of four to foil the security system, enter the house undetected, and overpower Ephraim and Renata. If Estella Rosewater was right about Patrick Corley, that his death had been faked somehow and that he was still alive, Corley might have been Maddison’s partner that bloody night. But then who were the other two? She hadn’t heretofore been seen with anyone else.

She’d lied about her father being a Microsoft executive, about her mother being a Seattle prosecutor. But if she was Emily, then her lies were quid pro quo, because he had lied more egregiously to her back in the day, before she had disappeared, and his lies had a greater consequence than hers. He couldn’t hold her to a standard that, when it counted most, he’d been unable to meet.

And if she wasn’t Emily . . . ? Consciously, he knew that she might not be—logically could not be—the woman he had loved and lost. However, what we perceive consciously is not the fullness of reality. On deeper levels, subconsciously and instinctively, he was convinced that Maddison must somehow be Emily. Down even deeper in the matrix of himself, his soul perceived with conviction what his mind alone could not entirely admit or understand: that she was Emily Carlino, the one and only, the same that he had loved.

And being Emily, she was incapable of killing anyone. Emily was gentle, loving, kind, wise to the ways of humanity but also faithful to the expectations of God. Whatever game she was playing with him, she was not really an assassin. She would not have been capable of committing the atrocities that Gilbert Gurion had described, would not have been able even to stand by and watch as others wielded the knives that disfigured and ultimately killed Ephraim and Renata. The Zabdi murders had nothing to do with Emily, with Emily pretending to be Maddison or with Maddison pretending to be Emily. The case was a distraction, a red herring, a blind alley, and David dismissed it from further consideration.

As surely as he understood the psychology of any character in one of his novels, he understood his own. His every action arose inevitably from two emotions that had trumped all others for more than ten years, that were the bedrock of his identity: grief that had become a terrible settled sorrow, and acidic guilt that grew more caustic year by year. There could be no relief from either sorrow or guilt if Emily was indeed dead. Maddison’s appearance in his life had given him the first hope that he’d known in a decade, and he couldn’t let go of it. One moment he admitted Maddison was not Emily, but the next moment insisted that she was. His heart wanted what it wanted, and his heart rejected what might confound its desire, rejected logic and reason.

He supposed he had gone somewhat mad, but a little madness was preferable to unending despair.