I concentrated on the second part. Murdered. I thought about her past, about the hell she had gone through. I thought about how valiantly she'd struggled, and I thought about how someone probably someone from her past had sneaked up behind her and snatched it all away.

Anger began to seep in too.

I moved over to the desk, bent down, and reached into the back of the bottom drawer. I pulled out the velour box, took a deep breath, and opened it.

The ring's diamond was one-point-three carats, with G color, VI rating, round cut. The platinum band was simple with two rectangle baguettes. I'd bought it from a booth in the diamond district on 47th Street two weeks ago. I'd only shown it to my mother, and I had planned on proposing, so she could see. But Mom had no good days after that. I waited. Still, it gave me comfort that she'd known that I had found someone and that she more than approved. I had just been waiting for the right time, what with my mother dying and all, to give it to Sheila.

Sheila and I had loved each other. I would have proposed in some corny, awkward, quasi-original way and her eyes would have misted over and then she would have said yes and thrown her arms around me. We would have gotten married and been life partners. It would have been great.

Someone had taken all that away.

The wall of denial began to buckle and crack. Grief spread over me, ripping the breath from my lungs. I collapsed into a chair and hugged my knees against my chest. I rocked back and forth and started to cry, really cry, gut-wrenching, soul-tearing cries.

I don't know how long I sobbed. But after a while, I forced myself to stop. That was when I decided to fight back against the grief. Grief paralyzes. But not anger. And the anger was there too, lingering, looking for an opening.

So I let it in.

22

When Katy Miller heard her father raise his voice, she stopped in the doorway.

"Why would you go over there?" he shouted.

Her mother and father stood in the den. The room, like so much of the house, had a hotel-chain feel to it. The furniture was functional, shiny, sturdy, and totally lacking in warmth. The oils on the wall were inconsequential images of sailing ships and still lifes. There were no figurines, no vacation souvenirs, no collections, no family photographs.

"I went to pay my respects," her mother said.

"Why the hell would you do that?"

"I thought it was the right thing to do."

"The right thing? Her son murdered our daughter."

"Her son," Lucille Miller repeated. "Not her."

"Don't give me that crap. She raised him."

"That doesn't make her responsible."

"You never believed that before."

Her mother kept her spine stiff. "I've believed it for a long time," she said. "I just haven't said anything."

Warren Miller turned away and began to pace. "And that jackass threw you out?"

"He's in pain. He just lashed out."

"I don't want you to go back," he said, waving an impotent finger. "You hear me? For all you know, she helped that murdering son of a bitch hide."

"So?"

Katy stifled a gasp. Mr. Miller's head snapped around. "What?"

"She was his mother. Would we have done differently?"

"What are you talking about?"

"If it was the other way around. If Julie had killed Ken and needed to hide. What would you have done?"

"You're talking nonsense."

"No, Warren, I'm not. I want to know. I want to know if the roles were reversed, what would we have done? Would we have turned Julie in? Or would we have tried to save her?"

As her father turned away, he spotted Katy in the doorway. Their eyes met and for the umpteenth time in her life, he could not hold his daughter's gaze. Without another word Warren Miller stormed upstairs. He made his way into the new "computer room" and closed the door. The "computer room" was Julie's old bedroom. For nine years it had remained exactly the same as the day Julie died. Then one day, without warning, her father had gone into the room and packed up everything and stored it away. He painted the walls white and bought a new computer desk at Ikea. Now it was the computer room. Some took this as a sign of closure or, at least, moving on. The truth was just the opposite. The whole act was forced, a dying man showing he can get out of bed when all it really did was make him sicker. Katy never went in there. Now that the room had no tangible signs of Julie, her spirit seemed somehow more aggressive. You relied on your mind now instead of your eyes. You conjured up what you were never meant to see.

Lucille Miller headed into the kitchen. Katy followed in silence. Her mother began to wash dishes. Katy watched, wishing also for the umpteenth time that she could say something that would not wound her mother deeper. Her parents never talked to her about Julie. Never. Over the years, she had caught them discussing the murder maybe half a dozen times. It always ended like this. In silence and tears.

"Mom?"

"It's okay, honey."

Katy stepped closer. Her mother scrubbed harder. Katy noticed that her mother's hair had more streaks of white. Her back was a little more bent, her complexion grayer.

"Would you have?" Katy asked.

Her mother said nothing.

"Would you have helped Julie run?"

Lucille Miller kept scrubbing. She loaded the dishwasher. She poured in the detergent and turned it on. Katy waited a few more moments. But her mother would not speak.

Katy tiptoed upstairs. She heard her father's anguished sobs emanating from the computer room. The sound was muffled by the door but not nearly enough. Katy stopped and rested her palm on the wood. She thought that maybe she could feel the vibrations. Her father's sobs were always so total, so full-body. His choked voice begged, "Please, no more" over and over, as if imploring some unseen tormenter to put a bullet in his brain. Katy stood there and listened, but the sound did not let up.

After a while she had to turn away. She continued to her own room. Then she packed her clothes in a knapsack and prepared herself to end this once and for all.

I was still sitting in the dark with my knees up against my chest.

It was near midnight. I screened calls. Normally I would have turned off the phone, but the denial was still potent enough to make me hope that maybe Pistillo would call and tell me it was all a big mistake. The mind does that. It tries to find a way out. It makes deals with God. It makes promises. It tries to convince itself that maybe there is a reprieve, that this could all be a dream, the most vicious of nightmares, and that somehow you can find your way back.

I had picked up the phone only once and that was for

Squares. He told me that the kids at Covenant House wanted to have a memorial service for Sheila tomorrow. Would that be all right? I told him that I thought Sheila would have really liked that.

I looked out the window. The van circled the block again. Yep, Squares. Protecting me. He had been circling all night. I knew that he would not stray far. He probably hoped that trouble arose just so he could unload on someone. I thought about Squares's comment that he had not been all that different from the Ghost. I thought about the power of the past and what Squares had gone through and what Sheila had gone through and marveled at how they'd found the strength to swim against the riptide.

The phone rang again.

I looked down into my beer. I was not one for drinking away my problems. I sort of wished that I were. I wanted to be numb right now, but the opposite was happening. My skin was being ripped off so that I could feel everything. My arms and legs grew impossibly heavy. It felt as though I were sinking under, drowning, that I would always be just inches from the surface, my legs held by invisible hands, unable to break free.