She also needed clarity and objectivity.

Seven years of journals. Seven years, she thought, of trying to restore her emotional life.

I smell roses and ocean as I get up from the couch.

A window must be open.

Even now, at thirty-two, no longer a young bride, no longer a law student with a handsome FBI special agent husband, no longer inexperienced in matters of violent death, Abigail could feel herself walking into the back room, convinced the wind had knocked over tools she and Chris had left haphazardly that morning, when they gave up their leak-fixing to make love upstairs in their sun-filled bedroom.

She noticed the slight tremble in her hands and swore under her breath, tensing her fingers as she tore more pages and set them atop her pile. There was no wind, and the grass-what there was of it in her postage stamp of a backyard-was damp from an overnight rain. Adequate conditions for burning, although she was in a tank top and shorts. If her bare skin got hit with sparks, it’d serve her right.

As I step into the back room, I see not a cracked window but the door to the porch standing wide open, and for the first time I feel a jolt of real fear.

I didn’t leave the door open.

“Chris?”

I call my husband’s name just as I hear the floorboards creak behind me.

Just as the blow comes to the back of my head.

Her chest tightening, Abigail dropped the partially torn spiral notebook back onto the chair and quickly struck a wooden match, tossing it onto the pile of ripped pages.

Flames shot two feet into the hot, still air.

“Whoa, there. That’s some fire you’ve got going.”

She looked up at Bob O’Reilly trotting down the last of the steps from his top-floor apartment in the triple-decker they and Scoop Wisdom-all three of them detectives with the Boston Police Department-had bought together a year ago, pooling their resources to afford the city’s sky-high real estate prices. Bob, a twice-divorced father of three, lived alone. Scoop, who worked in internal affairs and had a well-earned reputation with the women of Boston, occupied the middle floor. Abigail, a homicide detective and widow, had the first floor. She got along with Bob and Scoop partly because they understood she had no intention of sleeping with either of them.