A cool peace followed in the wake of the realization. I didn’t move to pick up the fallen screen door. Nor did I go inside, instead sitting down on the back step. A freight train thundered past, and the quiet that it left behind was nearly as stark as silence.

Here was the solitude I’d run from all summer long, filling my hours with the Hennessys, with Cicero, even with strangers like Special K. I’d sought a hundred problems to distract myself from the ones I’d been living with since Shiloh went to Blue Earth. I hadn’t been picky. Anyone’s troubles would do. So long as they weren’t my own. So long as they allowed me to keep my own feelings chained and unexamined.

If I had been blind to the pride and guilt that had motivated Cicero Ruiz, it was probably because I’d had a lot of practice at refusing to see it. They were the same feelings that motivated my husband. It was pride that had led Shiloh to try to balance the scales for Kamareia’s death when the courts hadn’t been able to. Not only that, but Shiloh believed he could do it while shielding me from complicity, or even from any knowledge of his actions. When he had failed, Shiloh had refused to plead extenuating circumstances and seek a lighter sentence; he had gone to prison. I thought I understood better now why he had fallen silent from behind those prison walls: it was shame. Shiloh saw his actions as a dirty handprint on the life I was trying to keep upright here in Minneapolis.

I was not guiltless here, either. I hadn’t reached out to Shiloh, afraid of being the first to break our mutual silence and to possibly be brushed aside. I had been unable to admit to myself how much I was angered by the effective loss of my husband, a loss I’d been so, so careful to frame in my mind not as abandonment or betrayal but simply as circumstance.

I slept early that night, and it was about two in the morning when I woke up, alert and clear-minded and knowing I wouldn’t sleep any more. Instead I got up, washed my face and dressed, and threw a few items of clothing and some money in my duffel bag. Last of all, I put on my copper wedding ring, retrieved from the drawer of the night table.

On the road east, to Wisconsin, the air was warm like summer, sweet with chlorophyll. I didn’t feel tired at all. I’d be at the prison by dawn. Ahead, low in the southeast and preternaturally large and pale from its proximity to the horizon, Orion sprawled like a patron saint over my destination.

JODI COMPTON lives in California. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The 37th Hour, which also features Detective Sarah Pribek, and which is available in paperback from Dell.