That said, she exhaled and did the silent thing again. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Whoosh, glide. Not a word. Over the last few months, I’d thought I’d learned to deal with this.

Sherry had always been independent, and proud of it. But she wasn’t selfish. She’d once taken in a friend being abused by a cop husband. She was always first to jump into a homicide case, to do the extra work others hadn’t thought of. Before she shared her thoughts on cases with me, even though I wasn’t officially a part of the law enforcement family anymore, it was usually the ethical quandaries she wanted to talk about.

Now she would go someplace in silence, in her own thoughts, seeing images only she could watch in her head, to a place that I could only speculate about: Was it anger over the loss of her leg, or a loathing of her own body? Was it self-pity that someone of her character would naturally fight against? A submerged hatred of me, given what my decisions had brought upon her?

I took this new flicker of thought, this idea that she felt a responsibility to reach out to someone else, as a good thing.

While we took a long bend in the trail, I accepted her silence and focused instead on a dark blip in the saw grass ahead. As we got closer, I could make out the green-black body of an alligator halfway out of the lake, up on the shore with its snout up in the air as if it were smelling the breeze. Twenty yards closer, and I could see that it was huge, a fifteen-footer at least. And it had something in its jaws. Twenty more yards, and I could see that wedged in the gator’s mouth was a Florida soft-shell turtle, the size of one of those big picnic salad bowls.

“Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.