“You never got married?”

She looked at me. “No, Alex. I got close once. There was this other officer, Jimmy Natoli. That’s right, my name would have been Natalie Natoli. But he really wanted me to quit the force after I married him. I didn’t want to do that. Although maybe, looking back on it… I suppose I still had problems getting close to someone. After it fell apart, I was still on the force with him, so things got a little weird. That’s when I got shipped up to the Hearst station. I was thinking, great, look where they stuck me, way the hell up here. They partnered me with Claude DeMers, too, this ancient guy. They must really want to bury me up here.”

She took another drink.

“But then he turned out to be so great. It sounds kind of dumb, but with my grandfather gone… It was like I really needed him, you know? He tried to make things good for me. Until that business at the lake.”

“Yeah,” I said. That part I knew.

“I swear, I’m cursed, Alex. Wherever I go, bad things happen.”

“Come on, Natalie.”

“But no matter what,” she said, “I always had this place to come back to. When my grandmother died, she left it to me. I hired somebody to come in and keep things working. Run the furnace, make sure the pipes didn’t freeze. But I was never sure what to do with it. I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. It was like my refuge from the world. But now… I’ve been here for a few weeks, and I’m thinking maybe it’s time.”

“That’s why you’re doing all this packing.”

She nodded her head. “Yeah. But after I sell it, then what? I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”

I didn’t say anything. I sat there with her for a while until she got up to do the dishes. I grabbed a towel and dried while she washed. Later, we went to bed and this time we slept together, despite what she had said about always sleeping alone. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she had told me that day, about her own scars and how they’d never heal completely. It helped me to understand her a little bit better, how she could be so close to me one moment and then suddenly a million miles away.