He nods. “Girls like her, you can’t talk sense to them. You can’t reason with them. They’re like wild animals who need to be reined in. Controlled.”

Staring into Charlie’s eyes, Frankie realizes he actually believes what he’s just said, that the world would be better off without women like Taryn, women whose turbulent emotions and desperate choices complicate the lives of men. She thinks of her own spirited daughters who so passionately embrace life and sometimes get into trouble for it. She thinks of the tragic heroines whom Taryn wrote about, the Medeas and the Queen Didos—women who loved too deeply and who suffered for it.

No, thinks Frankie. The world would not be better without such women.

“That girl had to be stopped,” says Charlie. “My family needed to be protected. I just did what I needed to do.”

“Now I’m going to do what I need to do.” Frankie takes Mac’s handcuffs and places them over Charlie’s wrists.

They close with a deeply satisfying snap.

CHAPTER 47

FRANKIE

Maggie Dorian sits at her husband’s bedside, her head bowed as though in prayer. Through the beeping monitors and the whoosh of the ventilator, she doesn’t seem to hear Frankie enter the SICU cubicle. Only when Frankie stands facing her across the bed does Maggie at last look up at her.

“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Frankie says.

“Where else would I be?”

“You should go home and get some sleep.”

“No, I need to be here when he wakes up.” Maggie reaches out to grasp her husband’s hand and adds, in a whisper: “If he wakes up.”

Frankie surveys the various tubes snaking into and out of the inert body and focuses on the EKG monitor, where the rhythm is rapid but steady. It is a miracle that he has any heartbeat at all. After all the blood he lost, all the devastation left by Charlie’s bullet, Jack Dorian should be dead, and his wife should be planning his funeral.

Something that will probably come to pass.

Frankie pulls up a chair and sits down. For a long time, neither woman speaks, and the only sound is the wheeze of the ventilator cycling its twenty breaths per minute. What words of comfort can she offer to a woman whose life has so completely collapsed into ruins? Maggie’s father, Charlie, will almost certainly die of cancer in prison. Her husband might never awaken, and she will be left to raise their child on her own. In all this tragedy, that was the one point of light: there is a baby on the way.

“How is my father?” The question is asked so softly Frankie almost misses it.

“Charlie is cooperating. Fully. He understands what will happen to him next, and he’s prepared for it.” Frankie pauses. “I promise I’ll do everything I can to make sure he’s kept comfortable till the end.”

Maggie sighs, as if sorrow is squeezing the breath out of her. “I can’t believe he actually did it. That’s not the father I grew up with.”

“He told us he never planned to kill the girl. He just wanted her to leave you and Jack alone. He went to her apartment hoping to buy her silence, but she became angry. She struck him, he defended himself, and there was a struggle. He let his rage get the best of him, and he lost control. After it was over, he tried to salvage the situation by making it look like suicide. That, at least, is what he told us. I don’t know if all of that is true, but I am certain he was trying to protect you, Maggie. Trying to save your marriage.”

“I know.” Her hand tightens around her husband’s inert hand. “And now I might lose both of them.”

Frankie does not tell Maggie what else she’s learned about Charlie Lucas, after a phone call to Cambridge PD Internal Affairs. She does not tell her about the prisoner whose skull he fractured or the cocaine he was suspected of planting during a drug raid. She does not tell Maggie that Charlie retired under a cloud of suspicion after he had taken his brand of justice too far. No, Maggie does not need to know any of this; she has more than enough heartbreak to deal with now.

“Please, Jack,” Maggie whispers. “Come back to me.”

Frankie stares at Maggie’s fingers, twined around the hand of the man who was unfaithful to her, the man whose brief and reckless fling led to so much pain and bloodshed. “And if he does wake up?” Frankie asks. “What happens then?”

“Would you forgive him? If he were your husband?”

“It’s not my decision. It’s yours.”

Maggie stares at Jack and gently strokes back his hair. “After twelve years of marriage, sometimes it’s hard to remember what made you fall in love in the first place. Why you ended up with this particular person. And for a while, maybe I did forget. And so did he. But last night, when he was lying on the floor, when I saw all that blood and I thought I was losing him . . .” Maggie looks up at her. “I remembered why I fell in love. I don’t know if that’s enough to make me forgive him. But I do remember.”

A nurse enters the cubicle. “Excuse me, Detective? If you could step out for a moment, I need to check the patient’s vital signs.”

“I was about to leave anyway,” says Frankie, and she rises to her feet. “Take care of yourself, Dr. Dorian,” she says to Maggie. “Go home and get some rest.”

“I will.”

But when Frankie walks out of the cubicle and glances back through the window, she sees that Maggie hasn’t moved. She is still at her husband’s side, stroking his hair, waiting for him to wake up.

Frankie drives home through deserted streets, her vision blurred by a haze of fatigue. Even though it’s now April, this night has turned clear and frosty, a step backward toward winter. She is tired of the cold, tired of wearing wool scarves and down jackets. Tired of shivering at death scenes.

She has vacation time coming up, two weeks during which she could drink pi?a coladas while lying on a beach somewhere, but she knows herself too well. This will not happen. Instead she will almost certainly spend her vacation at home with the girls.

While she still can.

When she walks into her apartment, she’s glad to see that both her daughters’ coats are hanging in the closet, relieved that her family is safely home for the night. Just to be certain, she peeks into their room, and yes, there they are, sound asleep in their beds after yet another night out. Though the beds are on opposite sides of the room, they lie facing each other, Gabby on her left, Sibyl on her right, as though reaching out to embrace each other, the way they did while sharing her womb. It makes Frankie happy, knowing her daughters have this bond. If marriages fall apart or husbands disappoint, at least the girls will have each other to lean on.

She closes their door and goes into the kitchen. She’s exhausted, running on empty, but she knows she won’t be able to sleep. Not yet. After tonight’s events, she needs to sit quietly and take a few deep breaths. From the cupboard she grabs the scotch and, out of habit, checks the bottle to be sure the level hasn’t dipped beneath the tiny black dot she last drew on it with permanent marker. The level is right where it should be, so she knows the girls haven’t been sipping. Oh yes, Mama knows how to keep an eye on her babies. She pours out a generous glug, takes a deep swallow, and thinks about Taryn Moore and Charlie Lucas, about Jack and Maggie Dorian.

Most of all she thinks about Maggie, the woman who had everything until suddenly she didn’t. But that is the nature of tragedy. You go through life never appreciating the joy of a normal day until the instant it’s gone. All it takes is a knock on the door. A police officer standing outside to inform you that your husband is dead, found collapsed in a stranger’s stairwell. You think you’ll never know a normal day again.

You bury the body, pick up the pieces of your life. You stumble forward, into the new normal. That’s what Maggie Dorian will have to do, with or without her husband.

Frankie carries her empty whiskey glass to the sink, and as she stands there, stretching out the kinks in her neck, she hears her cell phone ring. Oh no, she thinks. Even as she pulls the phone out of her purse, she is steeling herself for the news. She looks at the caller’s number.

It is the hospital.

CHAPTER 48

FRANKIE

Fourteen months later

Two granite gravestones lie side by side, each decorated with its own pot of geraniums. The flaming-red blossoms are too much of a temptation for any baby to resist, and Nicholas Charles Dorian, seven months old, crawls across the grass like the speediest of turtles, moving straight for the nearest plant. Just as he closes one chubby fist around a blossom, Maggie scoops up her son, and he lets out a wail of frustration.

“Oh, sweetie, let’s find something else for you to play with. What’s in our big bag here, hmmm? Look, a pretty pony!” She hands Nicky a stuffed animal, but he’s not interested, and he flings the pony onto the grass.

“He really wants that geranium,” observes Frankie.

“Isn’t that just how it goes?” Maggie laughs. “They always want what they can’t have.”