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Ruth let out a cackle and touched the young officer’s arm. “We’ve missed you.”

“You might’ve, but they haven’t.”

Ruth looked at the other Sûreté officers, then back at Nichol. “You wouldn’t be here if they didn’t want you.”

“I came down on my own. They didn’t ask.”

“But you’re still here. Clearly they need you.”

“Sure,” said Nichol, taking a slab of smoked trout and putting it on pumpernickel. “They need me, but they don’t like me.”

“Is that important?”

Nichol studied the elderly woman, then looked at the others, so comfortable with each other. “Even you know it is.” Then she looked out the mullioned window to the village beyond, and the bright orange ball sitting among the leaves on the green.

“This rock is Eden,” said Ruth quietly. “Shipwreck here.”

“One of yours?”

“Auden.”

“My luck to shipwreck on Gilligan’s Island.”

Ruth wasn’t fooled. She’d seen the yearning on that young face. Heard it in her voice. “We all shipwrecked here. Don’t look now, but I think you’re heading for the shallows.”

Ruth cocked her head toward where Chief Inspector Gamache was looking at Yvette. And smiling.

This rock is Eden.

After dinner, Armand and Jean-Guy drove the hour to the theater. There they sat, in the dark, Jean-Guy watching the actors on stage. Armand watching the door. But no one joined them.

When it was over, they drove home. In silence.

Once back, Armand went online again, ordered tickets again, and sent one to Bert Whitehead. Again. Then he went to bed.

Yvette Nichol accepted the Gamaches’ offer to stay the night.

After borrowing what she needed from Madame Gamache, she crawled into bed, the cool sheets warming around her small body. She drifted off to the soft murmur of the others, Walton-like, wishing each other good night, and awoke a few hours later to the sound of sleet hitting the windows. It was two thirty in the morning.

Unable to go back to sleep, she went down to the study and worked some more on the laptop, knowing that whatever was in there was vital. Once again unable to make headway, she was about to return to bed when she noticed, through the squalls outside, a light. Up the hill.

At the church.

Putting on boots, a heavy coat, and a pink tuque she found in the closet, Yvette Nichol bent into the wind and sleet and wet snow—and was that freezing rain?—and plodded up to St. Thomas’s.

“Chief Inspector?”

He was sitting in a preformed plastic chair in the basement and staring at the wall. Actually, at a map of Québec.

Reaching out, she touched his shoulder, then leaped back when he abruptly stood up and wheeled around, sending the chair flying and bracing for a fight. It took just an instant for him to realize who it was, but it was terrifying to Nichol. She’d seen him in action before, and was always surprised at the rapidity of his reactions and ferocity of his fight instinct.

He dropped his hands to his sides. “What’re you doing here?”

“I saw the light.”

His face broke into a smile, and he wondered if she knew how that sounded, standing as she was in church. He resisted saying, Hallelujah. But only just.

“Couldn’t sleep.” She’d spoken directly to him, enunciating carefully. Her father was losing his hearing. She recognized the signs.