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friend and mentor from the Sun City debacle, stood between her and the coffin. The old priest was hunched over with grief, his gnarled hands clasped respectfully as he gazed down at the coffin’s pathetic contents.
    Grove gently pushed his way forward.
    â€œUlysses,” Dr. Endicott whispered, her sad, hound-dog eyes brightening.
    â€œDame Edith,” Grove said as he approached the woman. They embraced. Grove could smell the woman’s fatigue, the acrid tang of her sweat and perfume. This woman had come a great distance to be here, to say good-bye to a man she hardly knew. Grove realized right then that De Lourde had bonded with Edith Endicott the same way he bonded with all his friends: instantly and permanently.
    Grove turned to Father Carrigan. “Hello, Padre.”
    The old man raised his grizzled face toward Grove and managed an anguished smile. “Young man.”
    Grove put an arm around the priest. Carrigan’s body was trembling faintly. Grove’s eyes filled up. “I wish I knew what to say.”
    â€œWe’ll all see him again someday, Ulysses,” Carrigan said, his milky eyes twinkling suddenly, and all at once Grove saw the true man inside the old Irish priest—the mercurial demon hunter, the man who had sparred with the Vatican, and, more recently, the one who had helped exorcise Grove’s own demons at the culmination of the Sun City case. This same charismatic figure had now somehow reverted to his natural state: a loving, fatherly, neighborhood clergyman, equally at ease counseling an alcoholic father as he was baptizing an immigrant baby. A scalding tear tracked down Grove’s chiseled brown features as he turned reluctantly, inexorably, toward the open casket.
    He was just about to look down at the professor’s remains when a familiar figure shuffled awkwardly toward him in his peripheral vision. He glanced up and saw her, his stomach immediately clenching with emotion. “Hey,” he whispered at her, hardly getting the word out.
    â€œHey, stranger,” Maura County whispered back at him, an inscrutable little smile on her face as she approached with her arms outstretched. Her eyes were hollow and wet. A small, pale, girlish woman in her late thirties, the journalist wore a black dress with sedate pearls, and her mousy blond hair was pulled back in a French braid.
    They embraced, only inches away from the coffin, both of them shaking slightly.
    She still smokes , Grove thought as he hugged her. Still smokes, and I still feel terrible about losing her .
    They clung to each other as the air around them filled with sniffling sounds and the low shuffling drums of funeral blues. They hadn’t seen each other since the Sun City case, and had only talked on the phone once—and that was simply to confirm that their relationship would never work—but now it felt to Grove that their time together had never ended.
    It was hard for Grove to believe that they had yet to consummate anything , had yet to even kiss, but that didn’t matter to him. The way she felt to him right then—the way her diminutive five-foot-two-inch frame fit into the center of his chest like a nesting doll—seemed good and true.
    Their embrace lasted for an absurdly long time, like the embrace of two old veterans of foreign wars reuniting after a long convalescence. Grove had dreamed of this moment. For weeks he’d anticipated this very greeting. Would they kiss? Would they shake hands? Would the tension and awkwardness sour the moment? It turned out that the truth was none of the above. In the wake of all the unexpected sorrow, this simple hug was a salve, a balm on his soul. It lasted maybe sixty seconds in real time—at the most—but for Grove it passed in a single heartbeat. He had not felt this happy to see a woman since he lost Hannah.
    â€œGod, it’s good to see you,” he murmured when they finally stepped back and looked at each other