I drove across the bridge and followed the Queen’s Highway due east, along the shore of the North Channel. I arrived at her doorstep with a bottle of champagne and something else-what I thought would be a final answer to all the questions I knew she was living with. I had lived with the same questions, after all, with my own partner gunned down right in front of my eyes, on a hot summer night back in Detroit, in that one-room apartment just off Woodward Avenue with the tinfoil all over the walls.

I remembered the hell I had lived in for all those years afterward. I knew Natalie was in that same hell now. I thought I could give her a way out, the way out I never had.

Claude DeMers was buried a hero. He was the man who flew out to that lake to try to save the two Americans. When I told her the real story, I knew it would have to stay between us. When your partner’s dead, you can’t be the one to stand up and defame him. You can’t point to his grave and say there lies a dirty cop. I knew that, but I figured what the hell. As long as she knew. Maybe she’d be able to sleep at night.

I had another reason to find her. I admit that. I sat in the dining room of that old farmhouse, watching what the antique light did to her green eyes, and how it picked up a faint hint of red in her hair. We talked and then we drank the champagne and made an awkward toast to the new year at midnight. She finally told me she wouldn’t mind if I stayed the night, just so she wouldn’t have to be alone.

“I don’t trust many people,” she said to me that night.

“But you trust me.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can tell,” I said. Although, of course, I couldn’t. I had no idea what she was thinking. In another five minutes, I could have been back in my truck, heading home.

“That would be a miracle,” she said. “I mean a real miracle.”

“I think it already is,” I said. “Look how we met. And now here we are.”