He had pale skin and freckles and red hair that was graying gracefully; only his cornflower eyes suggested the work he’d done for almost thirty years ever got to him. His second wife had walked out on him two years ago, telling him he was an emotional basket case and recommending therapy. Instead, Bob got drunk with cop friends, packed up his stuff, and, swearing off marriage forever, moved out, eventually buying the triple-decker with Scoop and Abigail.

“Is that your handwriting? The purple ink?” he asked.

Abigail glanced at a scrap that had just caught fire. “I used different colored inks depending on my mood.”

“How’s a purple-ink mood different from, say, a blue-ink mood?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

“What are these, journals or something?” He seemed to have to struggle to keep the disbelief out of his tone.

“I started keeping a journal after Chris died. My therapist suggested it.”

“Oh.”

“She said to write stream-of-consciousness, without thinking, but to try to use all five senses and the present tense. She wanted me to write about our time together…what happened when he died.”

Bob scratched the back of his thick neck. “It helped?”

“I don’t know. I guess. I haven’t thrown myself off Cadillac Mountain.”

She grabbed the partially torn notebook and opened it up to the middle, tearing a hunk of pages, trying not to look at the words.

Chris leaves me with the ambulance crew, who will take me to the emergency room at the hospital in Bar Harbor. He doesn’t say where he’s going. He doesn’t promise to be back soon. He doesn’t promise anything.

I have no premonition of anything bad about to happen.

I just don’t want him to leave me.

Bob unhooked a pair of tongs from the side of the grill and stirred the blackened pages, rekindling the dying fire. “You never thought about killing yourself, Abigail,” he said, not looking at her. “Only thing you thought about was finding out who killed your husband.”