I got out of the car and hiked the path alone, climbing the cut to the highest peak and sitting there, surveying the miles of clean white sand that reached out in both directions, as far as I could see. The whitecaps on the waves reminded me how rough the ocean could be, how its angry pounding against the shoreline seemed almost a reflection of Mike's mood.

The late-afternoon sun cast my shadow far out onto the sand. When Mike came up behind me minutes later, it threw his tall outline even farther toward the water than mine-two long black figures alone in their mourning on an isolated piece of one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

I had come here with Nina the day that Adam died-to rage against his loss and to be in a place where we had always found serenity. With his family, soon after, I had scattered his ashes offshore at this very spot.

Mike stepped out of his loafers, took off his socks, and rolled up the legs of his jeans. The water was colder than I dared think, but I knew he wasn't feeling very much. For half an hour, he walked the shoreline until he was out of my sight and when he returned, his eyes were rimmed with red and swollen with tears.

He stood at the edge of the tide as it ran out and spoke to me for the first time since we left the house.

"She never caught a break. You know how it is? How certain people just carry some kind of curse with them from the moment they're born? They've got everything to live for but there's some relentless black cloud hanging right overhead? That was Val."

"Think what she had with you this last year. Think what happiness you gave her." I kicked off my moccasins and walked down to be next to him.

"Happiness? You know what a struggle it was for her to smile sometimes? You know what a triumph it was for her to be healthy again? You're sounding like her father-like all I was to her was the court jester, making sure she had a reason to laugh every single day she was alive."

"Don't put me in his category. She told me what you meant to her on every level, and I know how very much she wanted to marry you."

"I didn't realize she was that open about it," Mike said, reaching down to pick up a rock. He pulled back his arm and heaved it into the ocean. "And it was actually gonna happen, if you can believe it."

"Val used to-"

"Don't say it. I don't want to talk about her now."

"You have to talk about her, Mike. That's one thing you can still do for her. Talk about her and think about her every day of your life, from now on for as long as you live."

He turned and started walking back down the beach away from me, weaving from exhaustion as he moved. "It's too rough. I'd rather-"

"Of course it's rough. That's why you have to make yourself do it. Out loud-to people like me and like Mercer, who know what you meant to her."

"I think of the fucking mutts I have to deal with every day of the week. People who kill and steal and maim for no reason at all. Scumbags who'd just as soon shoot you between the eyes as turn the other cheek. Bastards who'd rob and rape their own mothers without thinking twice. Assholes who skin cats and shoot dogs for sport. Any of them ever die young, Coop?" Mike was shouting now, trying to make himself heard over the breaking surf. "Nope. They'll outlive every guy you ever met in a white hat, every living soul who ever did a good deed for someone else. They've got something in their genes that not only produces an absolutely pure strain of evil, but also lets 'em thrive till they're a hundred and fifty."

Mike stood in frigid water up to his ankles and threw another couple of rocks far out into the waves. "That's what consumes me sometimes. All of these shitbirds who don't deserve to live, they're gonna be here long after we're gone. And that sweet, smart, strong kid I fell in love with didn't stand a fucking chance from the get-go."

"You can't-"

"If you're gonna give me 'life isn't fair,' Coop, don't even open your mouth," he said, reversing his trail. "They're giving heart transplants to prison inmates now, you know that? Did you ever hear of anything more fucking stupid than that? You need a liver or a kidney or a new pair of eyeballs, you could be up for sainthood alongside Mother Teresa but you still gotta get in line behind some serial killer in San Quentin or a pedophile up in Attica."

He leaned over to pick up a piece of driftwood and began to trace something in the sand. It was a building, a childlike imitation of a skyscraper. "Can you imagine what it is to leave a legacy like that, something that you've built from nothing but your imagination and raw talent? I'd stand in front of these-these magnificent structures-things that Val had conceived from a drawing on a piece of paper and then seen through to the final construction. Do you know how much joy it gave her to create things like that, things that people will look at and live in and enjoy for generations?

"Me? I run around locking up bad guys like it makes a difference to anybody. Like there isn't gonna be another son of a bitch to come along to fill the vacuum before I even have the cuffs on tight. Then one of your cowardly colleagues gives 'em cheap pleas and they're back on the sidewalk a few years later, sticking needles in their arms and killing anybody that looks at ' em cross-eyed. Why do we bother? Why do we keep on doing it?"

He knew the answers as well as I did. There was no reason for me to speak.

Mike turned and climbed up to the top of the dune, sitting down in the middle of the path that led down the other side. He stared out at the distant horizon, the seamless line between the ocean and the sky. "I understand why you come back to this place."

I slowly moved up toward him, trying to get a foothold in the shifting sand.

"I used to look at you, back when we first started working together," Mike said. "I'd heard about-about what happened to Adam from the guy you shared an office with. I used to look at you and wonder how you handled the grief at that young age, when you seemed to have everything else going for you. I used to try to figure out how you got up in the morning and got on with your life. I didn't know why you gave a damn about all the needy derelicts who showed up on your doorstep, why you cared about helping any of them when you could have slammed the door behind you and walked away from it all."

"You think I didn't wallow in my own self-pity for months? You think the thoughts I had were any different than what you're going through this very minute?"

I reached out my hand and Mike extended his, to pull me up next to him.

"You didn't want to close your eyes in the hospital because you were afraid of your dreams, your nightmares," he said. "Me? I wouldn't mind dreaming. The dreaming's gonna be all I have left. It's knowing that every time I wake up and open my eyes, my first thought will be Val, my first image will be that broken little body that fought so hard to make it."

I stood behind him, my hands on his shoulders. He didn't brush them away, so I squatted and began to gently knead them.

"How long, Coop? You got a smart answer for everything. You got an answer for that, for how long it takes?"

"Longer than you can even begin to imagine," I said. I talked to him about emptiness and unfairness and profound unhappiness. I told him about the darkest thoughts I had confronted and the hardest things I ever had to do in the face of my despair.

"And it stops? You're gonna tell me that someday this pain just stops?"

"It's going to be with you forever, Mike. Just like you said. Before your eyes open in the morning-every single morning- you'll be stabbed in the heart by some memory of Val the second you're even conscious. The first moment you have a thought, it's going to be Val," I said, pausing and backing away a bit. "And then one day-maybe eight months, maybe a year from now-you'll wake up one day and you'll think of something you forgot to do the night before, someone you have to call about a case, some problem you promised to take care of for your mother. Some really trivial thing."