Faith was living with her sister now, in a much smaller house out in the burbs. She was involved in a divorce that was a thousand times uglier and messier than Charlotte’s but that would, she hoped, be a good thing. For her and her son both.

Rose Angier, as Roux had been known in Seattle, had lived in the very wealthy neighborhood where Dr. Wheeler still had a home. Ezra crossed Roux’s path when he was barely thirteen, going door-to-door to ask if anyone needed their lawn mowed. Roux had hired him. She’d had more work for him after that: weeding, pool maintenance, planting, trimming hedges. Within six months the boy was spending most of his weekends down at her place. Any excuse to be out of the house, his mother thought. At first.

Faith had eventually become uneasy about the amount of yardwork Ms. Angier seemed to need and how much she overpaid for it. Then she’d gifted the boy some kind of Xbox. Faith had walked down the street to talk about it; it was too expensive a gift. When no one answered the doorbell, she’d gone around to the back and let herself into the yard. She’d found her son there on a chaise lounge by the pool. He was with Roux, doing more than yard work behind her tall privacy fence.

She’d taken her son home, horrified, but too afraid to tell her husband. Ezra had begged her to do nothing, but she’d decided she had to call the police. She was going to, as soon as her husband left for work in the morning. Ezra texted Roux, and the two of them decided to make a run for it that night. They’d set off, following the road that would in the end bring her to me.

The police were still trying to backtrace all Roux’s movements. I could have helped them fill in some of the gaps, but I hadn’t. I was very good at saying very little. I’d been practicing for decades.

I don’t know, I said to most of their questions. My oldest and most favorite lie.

I’d been very clear on one point: Roux had shot me, and then, after I got the gun, she’d come at me with the poker. I’d been in fear for my life, I’d told them more than once, lying the way Roux always had, my body still and quiet and my gaze direct.

My single shot hit her in the center of her chest. Sometimes, at night, I could still hear the sound of her slight body dropping to the dingy carpet, so fast it was as if she’d gone boneless. I’d heard an odd, windy sucking noise coming from her, but only once. I crawled over just as the police were battering down the door, and her glossy eyes had looked up into mine, open and still and empty of everything.

You know what, Amy? she’d asked me right before I pulled the trigger.

I would never know what. I was fine with it.

Ezra was as cagey with the police as I was, maybe more so. He didn’t want to talk about any of it—not his relationship with Roux, not his month as a fugitive, and not the way she’d made her money. We were the most monosyllabic pair of witnesses in the history of Pensacola, I was willing to bet, but in the end it didn’t matter. The more the police dug into Roux’s past, the more filth they uncovered. She’d been plying her trade for a long, long time. They still didn’t know her real name or origin or even her exact age. Rose Angier was as fake as every other name I’d heard. The parts of her life they could track had been very, very busy, and within a few weeks they’d decided that no charges would be filed against me. Self-defense, they said. It was true enough to suit me.

“How did you know?” Faith Wheeler asked me the day she brought Ezra over to say good-bye to Maddy.

Her gaze shifted off me to the yard before I answered, making sure her son was still in sight. Maddy was clutching the boy’s shoulders now, telling him something with big, sincere eyes. I could feel Davis shifting uncomfortably beside me. I put a calming hand on his thigh.

“I don’t know. Something felt off about her,” I said.

“Thank God,” Faith said.

“You shouldn’t have gone to her place. Not by yourself,” Davis said, for about the thousandth time. Thinking about that night, what might have been, it always made him antsy. He rested his hand over mine, twining our fingers together. “I wish you’d called me.”

I smiled an apology. “I know. I should have.”

Faith was sitting up very straight, clearly wanting to say something else, but it took two false starts before she found the words. “I . . . There was . . .” She shook her head. “This is probably wrong of me. But I don’t care. I have to tell you, thank you. Thank you for—” She stopped again, shrugging helplessly, then turned her face to the window to look out at her beautiful son.

“It’s all right,” Davis said kindly, thinking she was grateful that I’d rescued Luca.

I understood her better. She was thanking me for pulling that trigger. Roux was dead, and she was glad.

I was glad, too. Sometimes. Mostly. I was almost never sorry. But still, there was a hidden corner in my heart that housed regret. I didn’t miss Roux, not exactly. Maybe, in some way, what I was missing was the game. Or the woman I’d been when we were playing, the one who could win it; she wasn’t in the room with us. She did not belong in this sweet house.

“I understand,” I told Faith. She met my eyes, and what happened between us happened in silence. Davis, watching Maddy out the window, wasn’t part of it.

“Do you feel . . .” she started, but then she gave me a shaky smile. “Never mind.”

I was relieved. I had no good answer. When I thought of Roux, I felt a lot of things. Some I couldn’t even name. But I could live with them. I could live with them all. I’d lived with worse.

Faith stood up. “We have a plane to catch.”

The kids were leaning in, so close, talking urgently. Maddy’s eyes were wide, and I thought she might be crying a little.

I said softly, “Give them another minute.”

We waited, and then Luca ducked his head in. He pressed his mouth against hers, just once, and very briefly. It was hardly anything, but Davis rose abruptly. Outside, Maddy’s hand fluttered up to her mouth. They both leaned back, blinking at each other.

“Okay. That’s it,” Davis said, already moving to the door to call them in.

I let him go. It was enough. It had to stop there, because of the ways “Luca” had acted out with Maddy. I recognized in retrospect that what I’d seen on the sofa had been a cry for help, but it hadn’t happened in a vacuum. My girl had been pulled sideways into things she’d not been ready to do or see or know. The “girlfriend,” it turned out, was Roux herself, sending Luca the same kind of headless selfies she’d sent to Panda Grier. Maddy had seen them. Maddy had seen a lot of things.

Her experience with Luca felt so out of order. I hoped that this sweet, chaste kiss might set some of it to rights. Back in Seattle, Luca would hopefully be having all kinds of therapy, but this good-bye was good for him, too. It was her first kiss, and it was as sweet and fleeting as such a thing should be. Considering his age, it should have been a first for him as well. As it was, I hoped that it would help reset his mouth. I hoped he would remember it.

I knew Maddy would.

Now, hovering over the silty bottom, I signaled to my girl.

You lead, I’ll follow.

She gave me an okay, and then she turned us east, down the slope. We were following the side of the barge that I’d searched the day that Roux was missing. Visibility was excellent, at least eighty feet, and as a curtain of baitfish parted around our bubbles, I could see the opening that Roux had penetrated. We paused there, and I looked inside. It was clear. No unsettled silt, no flashing purple fin, only a spotted eel, peeking at us openmouthed from inside a heap of rubble.

We went on past the opening, down to the stern. As we came around the corner, Maddy grasped my arm, hard, her fingers squeezing. I turned to her, and behind her mask her eyes were shining with excitement. She put one flat hand pointed up against her forehead. The sign for shark.

I turned with her to look. It was a bull shark, alone, and it was a big one. At least nine feet, so probably a female. She’d come cruising around from the other side of the wreck. She’d seen us, too. She glided toward us at an angle, curious, giving us side-eye.

We went vertical in the water, hovering side by side and keeping our faces toward her as she did her pass. I checked on Maddy, but she wasn’t worried any more than I was. She glanced at me, clearly thrilled, and I heard her noisy, joyous exhale.

The bull shark wheeled, glorious and beautiful and deadly, coming back for another pass, this time a little closer.

Hanging in the deep blue water, even as I turned to keep my face toward the shark, I began imagining all the things that I would leave here. First, and best, and sweetest, there was Tig Simms. Here, down in these deeps, was the only place I ever let myself wonder how he was doing and if he had answered my last text. I’d blocked him. He could have said a thousand things by now, the words waiting for me to change my mind.