part of the investigation anymore, I still felt it. I wanted to sit down with my notebook and start writing, trying to trace the connections between everyone involved in the investigation. I wanted to make lists and outlines and diagrams to make sense of it all. I wanted to do my job.
In the kitchen, I poured myself another glass of Grey Goose and orange juice and texted Julia. You still up? Sitting at the table, I sipped slowly and watched my phone, waiting, hoping for a message or a call. None came.
The I Was There Too theme song found its way back into my head.
Napalm smells best in the evening
It’s not worth believing what you heard . . .
Without even trying, I’d somehow managed to memorize the lyrics.
Hoping to chase it out of my head, I went back into the living room and opened the Spotify app on my laptop. I clicked on the “Discover Weekly” tab, looking for something new to distract me. Nothing really caught my attention, though, and I thought of the old playlist I’d made a few years ago while I was recovering from my injury and trying to climb up out of my depression. In the haze after my concussion, I had remembered Songs For My Funeral, and it had been floating around in the back of my mind ever since. Switching to iTunes, I scrolled down until I found it.
As I looked at the list, I felt an unexpected sense of relief wash over me. I couldn’t really explain it, but somehow looking back and remembering the darkness I’d been drowning in when I created the playlist seemed to make the darkness now less overwhelming. The hours I’d spent laying out the tracks, then revising the choices again and again, and the days I’d spent listening, still tweaking things, making adjustments here and there, had been a kind of boon for me, a way of figuring out how to climb out of the hole I had been wallowing in.
I could still remember the look on Jen’s face when I’d accidentally left it open on the desktop. The concerned sadness in her eyes when she thought I might be contemplating suicide. I’m not sure if I had been at that point. I don’t think I ever seriously considered it. Though I had thought it might not be that bad to die. But once I saw how deeply finding the playlist affected her, I stopped thinking that way. I knew it wasn’t just myself I was hurting, it was her too. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize my death would affect her, of course I did, but looking at her then made me feel it in a way I never had before. She tried to joke it away, but I knew. And that knowledge, more than anything else, was what gave me the strength to fight my way back.
After a bit of consideration, and knowing that I was likely to wind up changing it anyway, I decided to start the new, improved version off with Tom Waits. And I changed the name in case anyone saw it. I didn’t want to have that discussion again with Jen or anyone else. Songs for My Funeral became Come Twilight.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT
On the way to the hospital, Lauren asked if Jen had given me any news about the case when she got home. I gave her a brief rundown.
“Looks like things are coming together,” she said.
“It does,” I said. “Looking forward to getting back to regular duty?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I got out of the academy.”
“I’ll try to get kidnapped and assaulted more often, then.”
She grinned. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“How long did it take you to make detective?” she asked.
“It seemed like a thousand years.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I beat the average by a year or two,” I said, “but I had a couple of lucky breaks on big cases that sped things up.”
“Never heard that before. Everybody always talks about how hard they worked for it.”
“Well,” I said, rubbing the scar on my wrist, “if you’re able to work hard, you’re pretty lucky.”
The neurologist’s office was in a separate building across Atlantic from the main hospital. The doctor who’d evaluated me wasn’t available, so they’d squeezed me into the schedule of one of his partners, an Asian woman who seemed surprisingly happy to see me.
“Hello, Detective Beckett,” she said. “I’m Dr. Lee. You