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love with the wrong people? Answer me that.”
    When he began to murmur, she said, “No, don’t answer.” She placed two fingers over his lips. “Sshh. Just hold me awhile.”
    But he wasn’t able to sleep. When the wash of dawn suffused the room, Sean eased open the drawer of the night table and removed a few sheets of hotel stationery, then took a soft lead pencil from his jacket pocket. Throwing a hotel bathrobe across his shoulders, he sat down in a chair facing the bed and sketched Katherine O’Reilly as she lay on her side with the sheet drawn across her waist. He found her face beautiful in repose, as relaxed as a child’s face, the corners of her mouth twitching into smiles at some unknown dream.
    She awakened before he finished, and, seeing him sitting there, she walked naked behind the chair and bent down so that her chin rested on his left shoulder and her hair cascaded over his chest. For several minutes she watched intently as he filled in shadows with deft strokes of the pencil. Then she softly kissed his neck and whispered, “What are you doing in this dreary town? You should be following your dreams, wherever they take you. Start your life over, like I am.”
    Enveloped by her scent, Stranahan closed his eyes and let out his breath. It was like breaching a dam, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, he found himself thinking out loud with a fellow human. In the afternoon, Stranahan drove her to the furnished barn he rented behind a two-century-old farmhouse in Milton. In the loft he opened the old steamer trunk where he kept his watercolors and let her praise flow over him like warm water. She refused to accept the sketch he had made of her, assuring him that age had drained herof narcissism, and besides, who could she ever show it to? No, you keep it, she said, it will remind you where you were and who you were with when you followed your heart.
    Follow your dreams, follow your heart
. Stranahan caught himself repeating the clichés, but coming from her, they didn’t sound like clichés at all.
    “Are you making fun of me, detective?” She tapped him lightly on the nose.
    “Here,” she said. “This is the one I want. That’s you, isn’t it?”
    The painting was an earlier, Norman Rockwell–inspired effort, a sepia-toned watercolor of a boy in a rowboat, his small hands gripping the oars while his knees locked around a fishing rod trolling line into the water.
    “I’ll keep it where I can look at it, wherever I go,” she said. “This way, I’ll never have to say good-bye to you.”
    Stranahan cooked for her, and they slept that second night in the loft, buried in blankets with the window cracked and snow sifting on the sill. Forty-four hours after meeting her on the steps of the Park Plaza, Stranahan dropped her off in front of the architectural firm where she worked.
    “I know you told me no tomorrows,” he said before she opened the door, “but if I don’t ask if I can see you again, then I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering.”
    She looked at him tenderly, then lifted the corners of her mouth into a sad smile. “In a few days I’m heading to Canada, where my sister lives. I need to get away while I decide what to do. I want you to remember me like this, not as a fifty-year-old woman when you’re still a young man.” She kissed him briefly. Then she opened the door and he watched her walk out of his life.
    He had heard from her only once, early the following spring. She had addressed a postcard to the farmhouse. The postmark was Halifax, Nova Scotia.
    Dear Sean,
    I am doing well, enjoying my sister and nieces. I take long walks on the beach every day. There are still times when my mind goes into dark places, and sometimes hours pass of which I am hardly aware. But it’s a good start, and I feel as if I have made the right decision. I want you to know that you gave me back my
soul
. I wasn’t sure that I had one left. Best of luck in your career now. Follow