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The wind dies. The storm, shocked into silence. “You,” I say. My voice is barely louder than a whisper. “I can’t— I don’t understand.”

Parker looks at me with so much sorrow that I wonder if I’ve misunderstood somehow. But his voice doesn’t waver.

“I told you to go back to New York,” Parker says. Below him, Bill thrashes like a fish on a hook. His cheeks are smeared in blood, now freezing to his face. Please , he moans over and over.

“Let him go,” I say. “Please.”

Parker looks down at Bill as if he’d forgotten he was there. “Stop it,” he says coldly. Bill stops struggling, but he begins to sob. I wonder if I’m going to throw up.

Parker looks at me. “You know he bribed people to settle the case, but do you know all of it? How he wheedled and paid and threatened them. How he set them against each other, called her testimony a lie. All to protect himself.”

Parker kicks Bill sharply in the side. The older man cries out.

“Tell her,” Parker says. “She deserves to know.”

I should speak, tell him to stop, but not a sound comes out.

“I— It wasn’t supposed to be me,” Bill says, “in the boat that day. If Fred hadn’t been late, it never would have been me.”

“Tell her.”

Bill winces as though Parker had kicked him again. “I pushed Tommy into the water,” he says. “I—held him down.”

I see it like it’s happening in front of me now. The ice is gone. The sun is shining. A hot summer day. Tommy goes into the water. He shouts for help.

“He tried to get back in the boat,” I say.

Bill begins to sob. “She told me to hit his hands. Make him let go. She said it’s how you learn.”

“And you did,” I say.

“Please,” Bill says, but he’s not looking at Parker anymore, he’s looking at me. Pleading with me. My stomach lurches again.

“He was a child,” I murmur, but I’m not sure if I’m talking about Tommy or Bill. I look at Parker, my voice firmer now. “Bill was a child too.”

Parker’s face is stone. “And was he a child when he lied about that day over and over? He called her a liar. She drank herself to death while Sister Cecile tended her garden.”

My brain feels sluggish with cold. “She—you mean Sarah Dale?”

“Nothing happened to them. While my mother suffered—” Parker’s voice cracks.

Gears turn until it all snaps into place. The thing I couldn’t see. The same story, but from a different angle. Sarah Dale drinking too much. Sarah Dale dying in a car crash. Her two-year-old granddaughter in the back seat. My kid died , Parker had said that night with the whiskys.

“Parker, I’m so sorry.” I choke on the words.

He nods but his face doesn’t change. “After the case, she started drinking. Just a little at first to help her sleep. I don’t know when it went beyond that. I didn’t notice, I—” He breaks off. “I should have noticed.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“When you have a kid, you have all these firsts. First steps, first words. You just expect the rest to come. And then it was just—over.”

It feels like a hand is squeezing my throat. I can’t speak. Can’t breathe. But the words are pouring out of him now. Maybe he’s never been the silent type. He’s just been living behind a dam he built between his mind and voice.

“I tried so hard to hate her. But I knew all the things she was trying to forget. It was like this chain of terrible things, one leading to another, but if you followed it all the way back to the beginning—to the people who did this—what happened to them? Nothing.” His voice is blazing. “They all got exactly what they wanted.”

“This isn’t the way,” I say, but I sound unconvincing, even to myself. There’s some part of me that agrees with him. Jeannette Leroy didn’t earn a life of peace. She abused children. Watched a boy drown. She should have died in jail. But there are other kinds of justice.

Parker looks at me. For a moment, it’s like everything else disappears. The wind. The cold. The bleeding man at his feet. “There was nothing left for me but darkness,” he says. “At least, this way there would be a point.”

Something inside me breaks. Maybe my heart. I understand , I want to tell him. I too have looked into the mirror and seen an empty container, filled with grief.

Red and blue lights flicker on the ice. I turn. Coram House stands sentry on the hill. Police lights strobe the sky. I didn’t hear the sirens over the wind.

“You called Garcia?” Parker asks.

I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just nod.

“All right,” he says. “Okay.”

“Parker, let him go. Please. I don’t want another body.”

Our eyes meet for a long second. Then he looks down at Bill. He steps back.

It takes Bill a second to realize he’s free. Then he scrambles across the ice like a crab. “Help,” he shouts. He slips and falls and then gets to his feet again. “Here, I’m down here.”

He takes off toward the flashing lights at a limping run.

I face Parker, ten feet of ice between us. He doesn’t step toward me, doesn’t move. Tears make warm tracks down my face. It’s incredible what a person can carry inside, unfathomable from the outside.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

But I can’t find my voice, couldn’t forgive him anyways. It’s not up to me. But I can’t hate him either.

“Parker.”

His name comes out as a whisper, but his eyes are trained ahead, where the mountains would be if there was enough light to see them. Now it’s just darkness.

“If you knew you’d die horribly,” he says. “If you knew how it ended—would you go back and undo the moment you were born?”

He turns to look at me with those brown eyes ringed in gold, waiting for my answer.

I think about Tommy, his short life, his terrible death. Parker’s daughter, two years old, crushed in a totaled car. Adam, who lived with his own slow death rolling toward him. Would I erase them, knowing what I do about how their lives ended? Then there’s the bottomless sadness of my own heart. Would I go quietly into oblivion or do it all again?

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t undo it.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because, what else is there?” It’s not a good answer, but it’s the only one I have.

Parker nods. “I’m sorry, but I don’t regret it. You tell them that.”

He starts walking, slowly, bent against the wind. Toward the darkness. Toward the open water. Toward nothing.

He’s twenty feet away. Forty.

“Parker!” My voice is a sob.

The snow falls between us like a veil. And then he’s gone. There’s no crack. No splash. Just darkness. As if he was never there at all.

I have no idea how much time passes. A minute. An hour. Then voices. Shouts. The crunch of footsteps. Flashlights. My eyes don’t leave the darkness.

“Alex!” Someone calls my name over the wind, but I can’t look away. Strong hands grip my shoulders, turn me around.

I stare into Garcia’s face. I take in a ragged breath, as if I’m surfacing from underwater. Then I begin to shiver. “He’s gone,” I say through tears and chattering teeth.

“Russell Parker,” she says. It’s not a question. “On foot?”

I nod. “Out there.”

Someone drapes a blanket around my shoulders and I’m half-escorted, half-carried across the ice. I’m aware of Garcia shouting instructions as we go. Fan out along the shore. Set up a perimeter on the road. Crime scene. Boats. The storm. But I know they won’t find anything. Not on this side of the ice.

Garcia helps me into the back of an ambulance parked beside Coram House. Bill Campbell is already inside, a bandage taped over his forehead. He pulls down his oxygen mask. “I’m not riding with her,” he mumbles.

“Shut up,” Garcia says.

Their words are far away. I’m still out there on the ice, listening for the distant crack of the world breaking apart.