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Airports at night existed in a peculiar suspended animation. The janitor had mopped the floor around gate C12 twice in the past hour, but the smell of chemicals only intensified rather than faded. Ella wondered if the airport used the same brand they sprayed at crime scenes to mask death's sweet decay. A different packaging, perhaps, but the same active ingredients.

The departures board flickered and their flight to D.C. slipped another twenty minutes into the future. Weather in Virginia, the gate agent explained.

Ella shifted on the molded plastic seat. Her body had cataloged the past seventy-two hours in bruises and stiffness. A violet mark bloomed on her skull where Sister Mary had slammed the trapdoor on her head. There were four parallel scratches traced her left cheek where the nun's nails had raked her skin. Her shoulders burned from the desperate scramble up the cooling tower.

‘First rule of airports,’ Ripley said, not looking up from her magazine. ‘Whatever time they tell you, add an hour.’

‘We should get home by about midnight.’

‘Great. I can catch up on the Apprentice.’

Ripley organizing her life around television. Ella never thought this day would come. ‘So. First case back from retirement. How'd it feel?’

Ripley flipped a page in her magazine with such deliberate nonchalance that it betrayed her. ‘Like riding a bicycle with square wheels.’

‘That bad?’

‘Not bad. I was just… off my game.’

‘Come again? How so?’

‘Don’t pretend like you don’t know.’

‘Could have fooled me. You took down Sister Mary on a six-inch beam sixty feet up.’

‘That's muscle memory. I'm talking about here.’ Ripley tapped her temple. ‘The detection part. The seeing through bullshit part. I believed Canton's confession too easily. We wasted too much time on him. ’

‘We all did.’

‘You didn't. You had doubts from the beginning. I should have too.’

‘I had my doubts too. I’m just more stubborn than you.’

‘Never thought I’d hear that.’

‘It’s a brave new world out here.’

Ripley said, ‘I used to be the human lie detector. Canton was lying right to our faces. If I’d have looked a little closer, I’d have caught it and saved us a ton of trouble.’

‘Practice makes perfect, and you’re out of practice.’

‘That’s by design. I’ve spent the past five months trying to forget everything I knew.’

The terminal hummed with the white noise of collective human motion. A child wailed three gates down. The Starbucks barista called out order numbers. A businessman in a rumpled suit paced a six-foot section of floor while speaking urgently into his phone. Every airport in America housed the same cast of characters, Ella thought. Only the faces changed.

‘You know what they say,’ Ella offered. ‘You don't realize what you have until it's gone.’

‘Who says that? Hallmark?’

‘Almost everyone who's ever lost something. Five months isn’t long. Just long enough to get rusty.’

‘Apparently.’ Ripley smoothed a non-existent wrinkle from her pants. The cream sweater she'd worn when she first arrived in Granville had been replaced by a charcoal turtleneck and dark jeans. The civilian disguise had all but vanished.

‘You think you’d want to do this again?’

Ripley closed her magazine and sighed. ‘Why? What’s wrong with your man?’

‘Luca?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nothing, but we don’t work cases together anymore. It’s too difficult.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t change the subject.’

‘Fine,’ Ripley snapped. ‘And the answer is: I don’t know. I left for a reason.’

‘And now?’

Ripley tapped the armrest in that specific rhythm that meant her thoughts were outpacing her ability to articulate them. ‘It's not that simple.’

‘It's complicated,’ she said. ‘I miss it and I don't.’

‘Care to elaborate on that contradiction?’

'It's...' Ripley searched for words in a rare moment of verbal hesitation from a woman who typically fired sentences like bullets. 'It's like addiction battling with sobriety. I miss making the world a safer place. I don't miss seeing people I love as victims. I don't miss the fact I barely saw my kids growing up. The day my son got married, I was helping find a crossbow killer in England. I want to make amends through my grandson. He doesn't care about your body count or your closed case rate.'

‘I get it.’

‘My dad was a cop. Chicago PD. Missed my birth because he was working a double homicide. Missed my graduation because he was undercover. Missed my wedding because he was dead. Is that the circle of life?’

‘I didn't know that.’

‘Not in my file?’ Ripley's smile was sharp enough to cut. ‘Shocking. Bureau thinks they know everything.’

‘I'm sorry.’

‘Don't be. It was a long time ago.’

‘Still.’

‘The point is, I swore I wouldn't be that person for Max. That I wouldn't put the job before family.’ Ripley ran a hand through her silver-streaked hair. ‘And then you called, and Sister Mary started her holy crusade, and suddenly I'm back in it like I never left.’

‘You didn't miss a beat.’

‘That's what scares me.’

Ella turned to face her former partner. Or current partner. She wasn’t sure. ‘So why did you come back for this case? I still don’t understand.’

A flight announcement crackled over the intercom, smothering a dozen conversations in electronic static. Their flight to D.C. was finally boarding.

Ripley stood, gathering her minimal belongings – a small carry-on that contained everything she'd needed to solve a quadruple homicide. Efficiency had always been her particular talent.

‘Me neither,’ she said .

Ella guessed that the devil you knew was sometimes better than the one you were trying to forget. It wasn't yes. But it wasn't no either. And with Mia Ripley, the absence of absolute refusal was as close to enthusiasm as anyone was likely to get.

A peculiar hollowness opened beneath Ella's ribs as she watched Ripley gather her things. It was some grotesque hybrid emotion that sprouted in the no-man's-land between selfish desire and genuine love. Ella wanted her partner back, yet the image of Max's chubby fingers clutching toy dinosaurs haunted her with unexpected ferocity.

Maybe Max needed Riprip more than the world needed another profiler.

Ella smiled to herself and followed her partner toward the gate.

Some victories were permanent, some temporary. Ella had learned to count both as wins in a profession where true success remained forever just beyond reach.