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last Halloween someone had scrawled anti-police slurs in red chalk on our driveway. It was a city neighborhood, no mistake.
    Old Mrs. Muzio, our next-door neighbor, was coming out of her house with her old wolfhound-mix dog, Snoopy. I considered waving, but it was often necessary to stand right in front of Nedda Muzio to get her attention, so instead I cruised past her place to ours. Shiloh’s old Pontiac Catalina was absent from the driveway, so I pulled in to occupy that place.
    Perhaps he’d taken his car to the shop. Like the Nova, it was a first car, never replaced. More out of laziness than sentimentality, Shiloh maintained. It was a 1968 model and heir to all the problems older cars had—most recently, the timing was off. From time to time Shiloh mentioned selling it and buying something more reliable, but he hadn’t yet.
    I went in through the back of the house. The kitchen door didn’t, technically, open directly onto the kitchen but onto an entryway with a perennially dirty linoleum floor and a washer and dryer on the right. I tossed my plastic bag onto the surface of the dryer and decided to wash my clothes then and there.
    I had thrown them into the drum of the washing machine, and was just about to pour in a half measure of detergent when I saw someone watching me, an outline against the white of the opposite wall.
    Startled, I jumped; my gun hand in particular leapt into the air, spilling some of the laundry powder from the cup I held. Then I realized who it was and turned to face Shiloh directly.
    “Holy shit,” I said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” I took a steadying breath. “I thought you weren’t home, your car—”
    I broke off, unnerved suddenly.
    Although he was over six feet tall, my husband had never been the most intimidating physical presence among the cops he’d worked with; he had a long and lean frame. His features helped to make up for that. Shiloh had a face I thought of as Eurasian, with pale skin but strong and sharp bones. Most unusual were his eyes: they had a slight epicanthic fold, as if generations ago his forebears had lived on the steppes. The eyes made him hard to read. But right now I thought I saw disapproval in them.
    “What’s wrong?” I said.
    Shiloh shook his head slowly, definitely a rebuke. “You dumb shit,” he said quietly.
    “What are you talking about?” I said, but he just kept giving me his level, reproving look.
    Shiloh and I had never worked any cases together, so I’d never got a chance to see his interrogation technique. I thought I might be seeing it now.
    “Do you know how many people die in that river every year?” he asked finally.
    “Oh,” I said. “Vang told you?” My voice was a little high. The anger of people who rarely get angry is deeply unnerving. “I’m fine,” I said.
    “What were you thinking?” he said.
    “You would have done the same thing,” I said.
    He didn’t deny it. “I didn’t first learn to swim at age twenty-three.”
    “I was twenty-two,” I said.
    “That’s not the point.”
    I turned my back on him and swept the spilled laundry powder into the machine. Cranked the dial over to the warm-water setting, heard the muffled hiss as the cycle started.
    Shiloh came up behind me and laid his hands on my hips. “I almost had a heart attack when Vang told me,” he said softly.
    Forgiven, I felt a relieved, retroactive urge to apologize. Instead, I said, “I could’ve used you out there today.” He’d had experience with suicidal people; more than experience, a good track record. “She was my first jumper.”
    I’d given him an opening to say, And nearly your last, but he seemed to have forgotten the issue. He leaned closer to my ear and said instead, “I can smell the river in your hair.” Then he lifted the half ponytail up and kissed the nape of my neck.
    I knew what that gesture meant.
     
    In our bedroom afterward, Shiloh was so quiet I thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep. I lifted my