'You sure you're not coming down with something, Chief?'Ĭam shook his head, as much to clear it as to convince Hannah.

'He was indicted.' She turned to leave, but stopped for a moment with her hand on the door. He blinked his eyes, expecting the bobbing shoreline of Prest, or the sweet scent of the Loire Valley that you could carry in your pocket when you were within a reasonable distance, but he found himself staring at the pale, pasty face of Hannah, the secretary at the police station. He opened his mind as wide as he could, and let himself tumble into the beautiful blue of it. There was no Smith and Wesson jabbing into his side there was no mountain pass outside the window hell, maybe he wasn't even Cameron MacDonald anymore. If he got it just right - the thrum of silence in the station, the afternoon light dancing over the corner of his scarred desk - he could make himself believe. He had buried his face in her shirt, and started himself the very slow process of dying.įor the hundredth time that day, Cameron MacDonald, Chief of Police in Wheelock, Massachusetts, closed his eyes and dreamed of the Bay of Biscay. At the words her arms had fallen away then it was over. My love, he had said, I'll be with you as soon as I can. But he had held the pillow to her face calmed her by whispering in her ear. 'Now,' she said, 'don't you think I know that?' She smiled, that crooked little curving of her mouth. With a fury that surprised him, he turned his face into the bow of her neck, trying to commit to memory this softness and this smell. He would not blink, he told himself, until the next minute bled into the last. The quiet dulled his senses, so that he became fixated on the clock beside the bed. He watched her breathing pattern in the reflection of the glass, and tried to slow his own heart until they were equally matched.

'If you don't do it,' she said simply, 'who will?'įor a long while they sat side by side, staring out a streaked window at a town neither of them knew very well. She brought his hand to her lips, kissed each finger. 'No matter what,' she said, giving him a look, 'you cannot stop.' In the moments before, she laid a hand on his arm.

Mercy picoult