Five years ago, the violent meteor strikes wounded the planet, upsetting weather patterns, creating climatological uncertainty. That’s what the newspapers—and her ex-husband—said. The energy expelled was the equivalent of several nuclear bombs or volcanoes exploding at once. Only now is Washington beginning to recover, to settle into a new normal. Over the past week, the rains have returned to the Pacific Northwest, and with them, the defining green-and-gray color palette of the region. Trees are shrugging off their dead needles. Moss is thickening, flowers are exploding, and mushrooms are popping.

In the visitors’ lot—a damp patch of asphalt walled in by evergreens—she finds several squad cars, Chives’s Jeep Cherokee, the forensics van, and the medical examiner’s van. They are parked messily, with no attention paid to the white lines, and she clucks her tongue as if they were children who have carelessly left their toys lying about.

She can’t smell the air, but she can feel it—the cold clamminess like the breath of earthworms on her skin—when she steps out of her car. She collects her Maglite from the glove compartment and heads toward the woods. Some crime tape garlands the trailhead, and she ducks under it. A flashlight bobs in the near distance. A beat cop named Matt Bowers is walking up the trail as she walks down it. “Detective Abernathy,” he says.

“What’s the sitrep?” she asks.

He explains what he knows so far. Some high-school kids were coming out here to party. Up ahead—about a hundred yards or so—there’s a faint path that branches off the main trail. Follow it another fifty yards and you hit a stony clearing with a hot spring bubbling at its center. It’s a common site for illegal camping and bonfire bashes. The teenagers were so scared at what they found there, they left behind a twenty-four-pack of Rainier and some edibles. “Hope you packed your barf bag,” Bowers tells her. “It ain’t pretty.”

Nora doesn’t thank him but continues on—and a few minutes later, she stands at the rim of the rocky clearing. It is bowl-shaped and patched with moss. Along the perimeter, several Nomads have been arranged, and the portable spotlights busy the air with intersecting cones of light and conflicting shadows. When she enters a house, a restaurant, a grocery store, a crime scene, she always pauses, assessing her surroundings.

Down below, there is a body, and all around it, a slow, familiar dance is under way; cameras flash and notes are jotted and evidence bags are filled. She fights a tightness in her chest. Because she sees her daughter.