“Then why? Why risk losing everything just to fuck her?”

Jack flinched at the question. “It was a mistake,” he said quietly. “If I could turn back the clock . . .”

“Does Maggie know?”

“Yes.”

Charlie took several deep breaths, and Jack could hear the cancer gurgling in his chest. “Well, you made a clean sweep of your life. You fucked up your marriage. You fucked up that girl’s life. And you’ll never see the inside of another classroom. Way to go, Jackie boy.”

A sound from the other room. The front door opening and closing. Jack jumped to his feet. “Maggie?” he called, relieved that she’d finally arrived.

But when he stepped into the living room, it wasn’t Maggie standing there. He halted, staring at the intruder who loomed before him, eyes like burning coals in the shadow of the baseball cap.

“Cody,” Jack said. “Why—”

“I loved her. And you didn’t.”

“You shouldn’t have followed me. I’m calling the police.” Jack reached for his cell phone, but it was still powered off. Frantic, he pushed the on switch.

“Now I’m going to finish it.”

Only then did Jack focus on what Cody held in his hand: a crowbar. Even as Jack registered what Cody was about to do, even as Cody raised the weapon, Jack could not move, could not speak.

The crowbar came hurtling at his skull.

At the last instant, Jack dived to his right, flinging himself behind an armchair, and landed hard on his elbows. He heard wood splinter as the crowbar crashed onto the coffee table.

Cody pivoted toward him, moving faster than Jack had ever thought he could. Before Jack could scramble to his feet, Cody swung the crowbar like a baseball bat. It slammed against Jack’s ribs, and he sprawled to the floor, stunned. As he lay there, trying to catch his breath, his chest screaming in pain from the blow, he heard Cody’s heavy footsteps moving closer.

The footsteps halted, and Jack saw the boy’s shoes planted right by his head. In a telescoped moment he saw Cody raise the crowbar like a club over Jack’s skull. And he thought: This is how I die. A fitting finale to all that he’d set in motion from the moment he’d let Taryn Moore enter his life.

“Drop it, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” Charlie stood in the doorway, his .45 aimed at Cody.

Cody froze, still gripping his crowbar.

“I said drop it!”

Cody looked down at Jack, then at Charlie.

Jack dragged himself to his feet and staggered toward Charlie. “Don’t hurt him,” he said. “He’s just a kid.”

“A kid?” Cody’s voice rose in fury. “That’s what you think, you bastard? That I’m just a kid?”

Jack’s back was turned to him, but he could feel the force of Cody’s rage rushing toward him, as inescapable as death. He saw Charlie’s gun wavering in the grip of unsteady hands, the barrel trembling toward Jack and away and back toward him.

The gun blast threw a punch to his chest. Jack stumbled backward against a wall. Looking down, he saw red seep through his shirt in an ever-spreading stain.

“Oh no,” Charlie wailed. “God, no!”

In fury, Charlie wrenched the crowbar out of Cody’s hands and whacked him in the back of the knees. The boy screamed and collapsed to the floor, whimpering.

The lights seemed to be flickering in and out. Jack’s legs slid away beneath him. He heard Charlie’s wet and rattling breaths as he leaned close.

“You’re going to be okay, Jack,” he muttered. “You have to be okay.”

Jack tried to say something but could not draw in a breath. How had he ended up on the floor? Why couldn’t he feel his own limbs? A chill spread through him, as if ice water were pumping through his veins.

In the distance he heard the crash of the door flying open. Haloed by the light was the one face he wanted to see, a face sent from heaven. Maggie.

“He’s going to be all right!” Charlie insisted.

Jack heard cloth ripping, then felt Maggie’s warm hands pressing against his chest, trying to hold back the blood that was spilling out of him.

“Jack, baby, hold on for me,” she pleaded. She turned and yelled, “Detective Loomis! Tell them to have the cardiothoracic team standing by!”

He wanted to tell her he was sorry. That he loved her. But his voice wouldn’t work. And it was hard, so hard, just to draw in a breath. He looked at Maggie’s bloodstained hand, pressed against his chest, and focused on her diamond ring. The ring he’d placed there twelve years ago. I’d marry you again. Again and again and again.

If only he could have said the words out loud. If only he could say so many things, but already the room was fading to black. The darkness descended, blotting out the face of the woman he loved.

CHAPTER 46

FRANKIE

Too many things are happening all at once: Cody, red faced and flailing as two officers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. Maggie kneeling beside her husband, who lies sprawled and unconscious in a widening pool of blood. The far-off wail of an approaching ambulance. And Maggie’s father, Charlie, standing with his head bowed, his face as gray as a corpse’s. The weapon he has handed to Frankie is still warm, and it carries the acrid stench of gunfire.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, Maggie,” the old man moans. “I swear I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

“Stay with me, Jack,” Maggie begs. “Please, stay with me!” She’s pulled off her scarf, and as she presses it to her husband’s wound, blood instantly transforms the beige cashmere into red. “Towels!” Maggie yells to her father. “I need towels!”

Charlie is too stunned to move. It’s Mac who runs into the bathroom and comes back holding a bundle of hand towels. Maggie presses them to Jack’s wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. She is the only person in the room who might be able to save him, but already the battle seems lost. Jack’s breaths, shallow and rapid, have the rattle of drowning lungs. Maggie looks up at Frankie. “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

“I didn’t mean to shoot him,” Charlie says again. Unsteady, he wobbles toward a chair and sinks down. “All I ever wanted was to make everything right. Make you happy, Maggie,” he moans. No one is listening to him. In the chaos of the room, he is a forgotten old man, lost in his own grief.

Outside, the ambulance whoops to a stop, and two paramedics sweep into the house, adding yet more bodies to the pandemonium. They rip open bandages, insert IV lines, slap on an oxygen mask. The EKG beeps the frantic rhythm of a heart racing to stay alive. Frankie can only stand back and let other people work. Even Maggie is little more than a shell-shocked bystander. The paramedics are in charge, and she watches, numb and silent, as her husband’s blood dries on her hands.

“Okay, we’re ready to move him,” the paramedic says.

“Where?” asks Maggie.

“Mass General. Trauma team’s already waiting.”

Maggie grabs her purse. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“Dr. Dorian, wait,” says Frankie.

“I’m going to the hospital.”

“We need you here to—”

“Fuck that. I need to be with my husband,” Maggie snaps and follows the paramedics out the door.

Frankie lets her leave. She surveys the detritus the paramedics have left behind: torn packaging and stained gauze and a forgotten tourniquet, coiled like a snake swimming in the pool of blood. The blood of an innocent man.

A police officer has already led Cody Atwood out to the patrol car, but Maggie’s father is still sitting in his chair, head bowed, shoulders drooping. He looks as frail as a sack of old bones. Maggie told them Charlie is dying of cancer, and Frankie can see it in the man’s wasted temples, can smell it in this house where the air is sour with sickness.

She pulls over a chair and sits down so they can be face to face. “Mr. Lucas,” she says. “I need to inform you of your rights.”

“No need to. I know my rights. I was a cop. Cambridge PD.”

Frankie glances up at Mac, who’s already pulled out the handcuffs, and she shakes her head. The handcuffs can wait. This man is not going to fight them. Everything about him signals defeat, and she thinks they owe him some semblance of respect because, after all, he was once one of them.

“You killed Taryn Moore. Didn’t you?”

“I had no choice. She brought it on herself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She attacked my family. She attacked me.” Charlie’s head comes up, and he meets her gaze. As frail as he is, his eyes are coldly defiant. “You and I, we’re both cops. You’ve seen the same things I have, so you understand. You know as well as I do that this world would be a much better place if certain people weren’t in it.”

“People like Taryn Moore.”