tightened on the counter as it washed over him. Sweeping him up. Tossing and spinning. Drowning him.
“Does your hand still tremble?” she asked quietly.
He gathered himself and nodded.
“Sometimes. When I’m tired or particularly stressed. But not like it used to.”
“And the limp?”
“Again, mostly when I’m tired. I barely notice it anymore. It was years ago.” Unlike Isabelle’s wounds, which were mere months old. He marveled at that. It seemed both ages ago and yesterday.
“Do you think about it?” she asked.
“What happened when you were hurt?”
He turned to look at her. That face, so familiar from across so many bodies. So many desks, conference tables. So many hastily set-up incident rooms in basements and barns and cabins across Québec. As they’d investigated murders. Isabelle. Jean-Guy. Himself.
Isabelle Lacoste had come to him as a young agent, barely twenty-five. Rejected by her own department for not being brutal enough, cynical enough, malleable enough to know what was right and to do wrong.
He’d been the head of homicide then and given her a job in his department, the most prestigious within the Sûreté du Québec. To the astonishment of her former colleagues.
And Isabelle Lacoste had risen through the ranks, eventually taking over from Gamache himself when he’d become head of the academy and then head of the whole Sûreté. As he was now.
Sort of.
She’d aged, of course. Faster than she should have, would have, had he not brought her on board. Had he not made her Chief Inspector. And had that last action against the cartels not taken place. Mere months ago.
“Yes,” he said. “I think about it.”
Isabelle hitting the floor. Shot in the head. What had seemed her last act had given them a chance. Had, in fact, saved them all. But still, it had been a bloody nightmare.
He remembered that, the most recent action. But he also remembered, equally vividly, all the raids, the assaults, the arrests. The investigations over the years. The victims.
All the sightless, staring eyes. Of men, women, children whose murder he’d investigated. Over the years. Whose murderer he’d hunted down.
All the agents he’d sent, often led, into the gun smoke.
And he remembered his hand raised, ready to knock on the closed door. The rapping of the Grim Reaper. To do murder himself. Not physically, but Armand Gamache was realistic enough to know this was a killing nevertheless. He carried with him always the faces of fathers, mothers, wives, and husbands. Inquisitive. Curious. Politely they opened the door and looked at this stranger.
And then, as he spoke the fateful words, their faces changed. And he watched their world collapse. Pinning them under the rubble. Crushed under a grief so profound most never emerged. And those who did came out dazed into a world forever changed.
The person they were before his arrival was dead. Gone.
When a murder was committed, more than one person died.
Yes. He remembered.
“But I try not to dwell on it,” he said to Isabelle.
Or, worse, dwell in it. Take up residence in the tragedies, the pain. The hurt. To make a home in hell.
But leaving was hard. Especially his agents, men and women whose lives were lost because they’d followed his orders. Followed him. He’d felt, for a long time, that he owed it to them to not leave that place of sorrow. To keep them company there.
His friends and therapists had helped him to see that that was doing them a disservice. Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.
His inability to move on would trap them forever in those final horrific moments.
Armand watched as Isabelle carefully lowered her mug to the kitchen table. When it was just an inch away from the surface, her grip slipped and the coffee spilled. Not much, but he could see her anger. Frustration. Embarrassment.
He offered her his handkerchief to sop it up.
“Merci.” She grabbed it from him and wiped. He put out his hand to take it back, but she kept it. “I’ll w-w-w … wash it and get it back to you,” she snapped.
“Isabelle,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Look at me.”
She lifted her eyes from the soiled handkerchief to his face.
“I hated it too.”
“What?”
“My body. I hated it for letting me down. For letting this happen.” He ran his finger along the scar at his temple. “For not moving fast enough. For not seeing it coming. For being on the ground, not being able to get up to protect my