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“Agent Beauvoir, don’t you ever—”

“—wonder what would’ve happened if your father and I had never met?” asked Jean-Guy Beauvoir.

He looked across the tub at his wife, Annie, who was bathing their infant daughter, Idola. Then he went back to trying to put a sweater on a squirming Honoré, who was eager to get out to play on the village green with his friends.

The fact the child’s best friend seemed to be the deranged old poet Ruth Zardo both amused and slightly worried his parents.

“You mean had Dad never found you languishing in the locker of that Sûreté detachment in the middle of nowhere?”

“I mean when he recognized my brilliance and begged me to help him solve the most difficult murder ever.”

“Anywhere,” said Annie, who’d heard this before.

“In the world,” agreed Jean-Guy.

He released Honoré, who sprang out of the room, thumping down the stairs and outside, banging the screen door behind him.

“The lady in the lake,” said Annie.

Oui. And by the way, I wasn’t actually in the locker.”

“Only because you were too big to stuff in there.”

“Because I was too tough. And still am.” He bent closer to his daughter, smiling. “Daddy’s big and strong and won’t let anything ever happen to you, right, ma belle Idola, Idola, Idola.”

As Idola’s father held her flat, saucer-like eyes, she laughed. With abandon.

She was so like her mother that way. A light and easy heart.

“Dad did mention your contribution that day,” said Annie, toweling the child dry. “But it sounded more like ‘shit-head.’”

Jean-Guy laughed. “Sûreté code for brilliant.”

“Ahhh. Then you are definitely luminous.” She heard a snort of amusement as he turned and looked out the window at the village of Three Pines.

Harriet Landers let herself into the New and Used Bookshop and tiptoed up the stairs.

She needn’t have bothered. Auntie Myrna, in her signature huge caftan, was already up and in the kitchen of the loft, brewing coffee. Her partner, Billy, beside her, frying eggs and bacon.

Harriet had smelled it when she’d opened the door to the bookshop and thought it might be coming from the bistro next door.

An emerging vegan, her kryptonite was bacon and eggs. And real cream in her coffee. And croissants. She was too afraid to ask Sarah the baker if there was real butter in them.

It seemed her magical thinking, while not extending to incantations, did extend to croissants.

“Ready?” asked Billy, after they’d finished breakfast.

Harriet had showered and dressed, and made up the sofa bed in the living area.

She took a deep breath. “Ready.”

Auntie Myrna, unconvinced, folded her into her arms, and whispered, “It’ll be all right. We’ll be there. You look beautiful.”

Harriet smiled, and didn’t believe a word of it.

Jean-Guy had his back to the bedroom and was looking out the window at the peaceful little Québécois village.

Annie could see that he was no longer in the bedroom of her parents’ home in Three Pines. He was standing on the frigid shores of a lake that had just thrown up a corpse. The memory was never all that far away. And it was never really a memory.

That day had changed everything.

It was the day a disgruntled little shit of a Sûreté agent had met the distinguished head of the most successful homicide division in the nation. It was the day the man who would become Annie’s husband had met her father.

What would have happened had they not met? What would have happened had the lady in the lake not been killed? Had her father not chosen to investigate it himself?

What if he had not gone into the basement of that far-flung Sûreté detachment? A place not flung quite far enough.

Why had he? There’d been no reason. Chief Inspector Gamache hadn’t even been to the scene of the murder yet. There was no evidence housed down in the basement of the detachment. Only a surly young agent, discarded and forgotten.

And yet, Armand Gamache had.

Because he had to. Because, Annie Gamache knew, it was fated.

From the bedroom window, Jean-Guy watched their five-year-old son pause, look both ways, then run across the dirt road and onto the village green, where a bunch of boys and girls were kicking a soccer ball. The skinny boy gave every appearance of being impetuous, even reckless, while in fact being quite cautious. Not fearful, but careful.

He was like his father that way. Filled with piss and vinegar and caution.

An elderly woman and a duck watched the children from a nearby bench. Honoré ran up, gave them both a quick kiss, then turned and tackled another kid.

Even from the open window of his in-laws’ home, Jean-Guy could hear their shrieks of laughter.

Ruth, watching from the bench, shook her head in mock disapproval, then took a swig from a mug of what might contain coffee, though no one would bet on it.

Despite the laughter and fresh sunshine and the promise of warmth in the young June morning, Jean-Guy rubbed his hands together and drew his elbows into his sides.

The memory of that November morning by the forlorn lake had called up a chill. A cold that had settled into his bones, into his marrow, all those years ago had never really left.

But it wasn’t just the past that had resurrected the chill. It was the present, what was going to happen on this shiny day. So many years later.

There’s always another story,” whispered Jean-Guy. “There’s more than meets the eye.

His gaze shifted from the children and the poet to the solitary man walking around the perimeter of the village green. As a guard might. Not to keep criminals in. But to keep those inside safe from an outside world that could not always be trusted. But the truth was, this man, who had no business or reason to trust, actually did.

Jean-Guy knew that, as head of homicide for Québec, his father-in-law had seen things no human should witness. Day in. Day out. The corpses had piled up. Armand Gamache had seen the worst that people could do. Acts that would harden most hearts and turn a good person cynical, despairing, and finally not caring.

And yet Gamache seemed impervious, almost blind, to the horrors, even while investigating them.

When Jean-Guy, as his second-in-command, had finally pointed out the dangers his blindness posed to his team, to the citizens he’d sworn to protect, the Chief had sat him down. Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his fingers intertwined, Gamache had explained.

Yes, Jean-Guy was right. He’d seen the worst, truly terrible things. They both had. But he’d also seen the best. They both had.

He held the younger man’s eyes, inviting him to set aside for a moment the great brutality that existed and to remember the acts of greater courage. Of integrity and decency. Of self-control.

Of forgiveness.

Not by moral giants, not performed by superhumans. These were men and women of human size and proportion. Some were cops. Many were not.

What blinded us, he told Beauvoir, were the horrific acts. They threatened to overwhelm and obscure the decency. It was so easy to remember the cruelty because those left a wound, a scab that hid the rest. Hid the best. But those appalling acts, those appalling people, were the exception.

“You need to remember that, Jean-Guy. The blindness you mention isn’t believing in the essential goodness of people, it’s failing to see it.”

Jean-Guy Beauvoir listened and nodded but wasn’t convinced. Which wasn’t to say he thought the Chief was soft. Anything but.