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the rest of his life. It was a magical place and he had preferred it to heaven becauseat that age Joe didn’t think there could be trout streams in the clouds.
    His father shared his love for the park, which was the reason they vacationed there year after year. Their mutual love for it was one of the few things they ever agreed on, other than the movie Shane . It was the one place, Joe recalled, where his fathercame alive, stopped drinking, and played at being an amateurgeologist—explaining to his two young sons that there were three kinds of thermal features in the world: geysers, mud pots, and fumaroles (steam vents), and Yellowstone featuredthem all. He remembered his father running down a boardwalk in the Upper Geyser Basin—actually running!— and shouting over his shoulder to his boys to follow him becauseOld Faithful itself was about to erupt. It was a place where one could look into the cruel molten heart of the earth itself, and Joe had once done exactly that. Or thought he had. It was in a huge lung-shaped hot pool, the water vivid aquamarine,steam hovering above the calm surface. A shaft of sunlight plunged deep into the pool, which looked so inviting but was nearly two hundred degrees, illuminating bleached-whitebison bones resting on rock shelves as far down as he could see. Bones! And no bottom to the pool; it simply descendedfar past where the sun could reach. For years, he had nightmares about those bones, about falling into the pool, about sinking slowly as the water got hotter and hotter, his bones coming to rest on an outcropping.
    His brother loved it too, but in a different way.
    But he couldn’t remember Yellowstone without what came next: the darkest period of his young life.
    He’d never been back.
    He’d attempted to defeat the demons eight years before, when Sheridan was six and Lucy a baby. Joe had borrowed a tent, and their plan was to spend a week camping in Yellowstone,just as he had done when he was a child. He would cook meals over a campfire, and they’d see the sights: Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Lower and Upper Falls. Everythinghad been ahead of them then and nothing seemed daunting.He’d actually looked forward to going back to the park and putting all the bad memories about it behind him for good. But the week before they went, Marybeth discovered she was pregnant,and the early weeks would mean morning sickness and misery. Although she was willing to gut it out, they postponed the trip for later. It was the year they had been assigned the SaddlestringDistrict, a year before violence entered their lives. And never went very far away.
    Marybeth was the most practical woman Joe had ever known. She ran the finances for the family, her business, her clients. She could see things clearly. Yet she had not even mentionedthat if he went back to the state—with a raise—their situationwould dramatically improve. That a house in town away from Missy would be within reach.
    She looked up and studied his face. He tried not to give his thoughts away. He didn’t succeed.
    “You really want to do this, don’t you?”
    Joe said nothing.
    “You want to get back into it. You want to carry a badge and a gun again, don’t you?”
    “I don’t like to be a failure,” he said.
    “Stop it. You’re not a failure.”
    He let that lie. The last thing he wanted was to make her tell him why he wasn’t a failure. He could counter every argument.
    “Joe, what do you want to do?”
    There were so many reasons not to accept the offer. Pope. Bureaucracy. The chance, once again, that the evil he encounteredwould affect his family.
    But . . .
    “Yes, I want to do it.”
    “Then it’s settled,” Marybeth said. “Call the governor.”
    “I love you,” he said.
    She reached out and squeezed his arm. “I love you too, Joe.”
    “I don’t know why.”
    She laughed, said, “Because you want to do good, even when you should know