I’m lying on our living room floor, fire blazing over my head. Dalton sleeps beside me. Storm whines, and I snap out of my thoughts and give a soft whistle that brings her bounding out of the kitchen. When she was a puppy, we’d barricade her in there whenever Dalton and I needed private time. Now we only need to kiss, and she’ll give a jowl-quivering sigh and lumber off to the kitchen and wait for that whistle.

When she bounds in, I signal for her to take the exuberance down a few notches. She creeps over and sniffs Dalton’s head, making sure he’s asleep. I give her a pat, and she settles in on my other side, pushing as far onto the bearskin rug as she can manage.

As I rub behind her ears, I pick up on her anxiety. She knows something is bothering us, our stress vibrating through the air even now, as Dalton sleeps.

I don’t think he has taken an easy breath since Brady arrived. So I may have intentionally worn him out tonight. But I’m wide awake, tangled in my thoughts.

I give Storm one last pat, head into the kitchen, and pull tequila from the cupboard. One shot downed. Then a second. I’m standing there, clutching the counter edge, when I hear a gasp from the living room.

“Casey?”

I jog in, and Dalton’s scrambling up, eyes open but unseeing.

“I’m right here,” I say, but he still doesn’t seem to notice. He’s on his feet now, looking from side to side.

“Casey?” Louder now. I hurry beside him and put my hand on his arm. “I’m right here.”

He turns, exhales hard. His arms go around me, and he’s only half awake, as I lower us back to the floor. His head hits the rug, and he pulls me in, clutched like a security blanket, his heart rate slowing as he drops back into sleep.

An hour passes.

I’m still entwined with him, my head on his chest as I listen to the beat of his heart. That usually lulls me back to sleep after my nightmares. Tonight it doesn’t. It can’t.

I would get up and read a book, but if I leave, he’ll wake, and he needs his sleep. So I lie there, listening to the dog’s snores. Then Dalton’s breathing hitches. His heart thumps, and he bolts up, gasping again.

“I’ve made a mistake,” he says.

I don’t answer. I just wait.

He says it again. Not “I fucked up,” but “I made a mistake.” His voice is soft, a little boyish, a little breathless. He’s awake but with one toe in that twilight place.

I adjust so I’m sitting with him as he squeezes his eyes shut.

“With Brady,” he says. “We need to do something else.”

“Like what?”

He runs his hands through his hair. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

Which is exactly what I’ve been lying here thinking. He says, “This isn’t the way to handle it, but I don’t know what is,” and that articulates my thoughts as perfectly as if he’s pried them from my brain.

“Fuck,” he says, and I have to smile, hearing him come back to himself. He looks at me. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

“Pretty much.”

Silence. When he speaks again, his voice is low. “I keep wanting to ask what we could do differently, but if you had an idea, you’d give it.”

“I would.”

Dalton’s eyes shut. A sliver of moonlight bisects his face, half light, half dark. It’s a lie. There’s no darkness there.

Light doesn’t mean carefree or easy or saintly, though. It’s not even light so much as . . .

If the absence of light is dark, what is the absence of dark? To say “light” isn’t quite correct. Even “good” doesn’t work.

“If I knew for certain he was guilty . . .” He lets the rest trail off.

If I knew for certain he was guilty, I could kill him. To protect the town. To protect you. To eliminate any chance that he hurts someone here.

That’s what he means, and maybe it should prove that he does have darkness. But this is sacrifice. It’s a man saying he would take another life and suffer the guilt of that rather than let anyone else be hurt.

Dalton’s lack of darkness, though, means he can never take that step as long as there’s a chance that Brady is innocent.

We both know innocence is a possibility, but I wasn’t lying when I told Jen it didn’t matter. We cannot prove Brady’s innocence or guilt. We cannot even investigate his crimes. He didn’t kill here. We can’t go there. Which reduces our options for dealing with Oliver Brady to two.

Keep him.

Kill him.

We can devise the most secure prison, staffed with our most reliable and loyal guards, while knowing we cannot truly guarantee safety.

Or I can conclude that we can’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty, but I must treat him like a potential patient zero and—without equipment to test for the virus—decide he must die.

“No,” Dalton says, and I haven’t spoken a word, but his eyes bore into mine with a look I know well.

Drilling into my thoughts. In the beginning, that look meant he was trying to figure me out. Now he doesn’t need to. He knows.

“If you make that choice, Casey, you need to tell me first.”

Which means I can’t make it. I’d never allow Dalton to be complicit in Brady’s death. Nor can I do it behind his back, for the purely selfish reason that it would be a betrayal our relationship would not survive. I’m not sure I could survive it either. I’ve had my second chance at a good life. I won’t get a third.

He continues, “If it comes to that, it has to be both of us deciding.” He settles back onto the rug. “I think we can handle him. Build a cabin like the icehouse. Thick walls. No windows. One exit. Only you, me, or Will carries the key. That door never opens without one of us there. Brady gets a daily walk. We’ll do it when no one else is in the forest. At least one of us will accompany him, along with two militia. That’s the only time he comes out. We’ll gag him if we have to, so he doesn’t talk to anyone, doesn’t pull his innocence shit.” He looks at me. “Does that work?”

It’s the course of action we’ve already come up with. He’s just repeating it, like worry beads, running plans through his mind, trying to refine it and seeing no way to do so.

“It works,” I say.

And I pray I’m right.

* * *

Day three of hosting Oliver Brady in our holding cell. We’re constructing his lodgings as fast as we can. The new building will serve as a food storage locker once Brady is gone. We have to think of that—construction like this cannot go to waste. That also keeps us looking toward the time when he will be gone.

I remember reading old stories of barn-raising parties, a building erected in a day. It’s a lovely thought, but this is being built to hold something more dangerous than hay. We must have our best people on it. Which would be so much more heartening if we had actual architects or even former construction workers. We have Kenny . . . who builds beautiful furniture.

Dalton is the project foreman. Since he was old enough to swing a hammer, he’s built homes meant to withstand Yukon winters. Solid. Sturdy. Airtight. He got up at four this morning to start work, after returning home at midnight.

It’s ten in the morning now, and I’m waiting for Mathias so we can get Brady’s side of the story. Part of me would rather not; I fear it will ignite doubt I cannot afford. But that gag can’t stay on forever, and we must know what others will hear once it’s off.

Brady is pretending to sleep. That’s what he does for most of the day. He must figure the law of averages says that at some point we’ll forget he’s awake and say something useful.

When the door opens, I say, “I hope you brought plenty of anesthetic,” in French. I’m kidding, while testing whether Brady knows French. He’s American, but he’s also a private-school kid.

Brady doesn’t react. Nor do I get a rejoinder from Mathias . . . because the man walking through the door is Brian, who runs the bakery. He has a Tupperware box in hand and slows, saying, “Did you just ask if I brought a nest egg?”

I snort a laugh at that and shake my head.

“Yes, I failed French,” Brian says as he comes in. “You must be expecting Mathias.”

“I am.”

He lifts the box. “I brought cookies, since I know you’re stuck here with . . .” His gaze slides to Brady, and I tense.

The cookies are an excuse. With almost anyone else, I would have foreseen that, but Brian has been to our house for poker. We’ve been to his for dinner. I talk to him almost every morning as I pick up my snack. He’s my best source of town gossip, but it’s the harmless variety, local news rather than rumor and innuendo. He has never once asked me for information on a case.

But now he’s here to see Brady. To assess the situation. And when his gaze falls on the prisoner, his lips tighten in disapproval.

“A gag?” he says. “Is that really necessary?”

I want to snap that if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

“Yes,” I say. “For now, it is. We’ve replaced the original with something softer, and Will’s watching for chafing. Given what this man is accused of, I’m okay with him suffering a bit of temporary discomfort. The gag will come off soon.”

Brian eyes Brady. “What does he try to say when it comes off?”

“What would you say?” asks Mathias as he walks in. “If you were in this man’s position, what would you say?”

“I-I don’t know.”

Mathias throws open his arms. “Look at where he is. Who he is with. He came to stay among strangers, accompanied only by a piece of paper accusing him of crimes. What is he going to say? That it is all a terrible mistake. That he did nothing.”

“Then why not just let him say that?”

“Because it grows tiresome. For twenty years, I studied men like this. It is banally predicable. It begins with ‘I am innocent’ and escalates to ‘You are a nasty human being for not believing me’ and continues to ‘Let me go, or I will slaughter you and everyone you have ever loved.’ Tiresome. It is bad enough Casey has to sit here all day babysitting him. Does she need to endure that as well?”

“No, but . . .” Brian sneaks another look at Brady.

“The gag will come off,” Mathias says, “once he realizes he wastes his breath with protestations of innocence and threats of terrible vengeance. Now go.” Mathias waggles his fingers.

Once Brian leaves, Mathias makes a very indecent proposition to me en français. Then he watches for a reaction from Brady. There is none, confirming that if he does speak the language, it’s probably limited to being able to order champagne in a Monte Carlo casino.

“Are you ready to interview him?” Mathias asks, still in French.

I make a noise in my throat. I’m unsettled by Brian’s visit, seeing a friend and supporter question our decisions.

People want their monsters to look monstrous. At the very least, they want them shifty-eyed, thin-lipped, and menacing—a walking mug shot. But reality is that a killer can be a petite Asian Canadian woman, well educated and well spoken. Or a killer can be a handsome all-American boy, a little soft around the edges, a young man you expect to see on the debate team and rowing team, but nothing overly rough.

When you look at Oliver Brady, you see wealth and privilege, but you don’t really begrudge him that, because he seems innocuous enough, the type who’ll attend a fund-raiser for the Young Republicans on Friday with friends and a Greenpeace meeting on Saturday with a girl.

Mathias opens the cell door. I’m standing guard, my gun ready.

“Step out,” I say to Brady.

I don’t tell him to put his hands where I can see them. It’s not as if he’s hiding a shiv in his pocket. He puts them up anyway and takes exactly one step beyond the cell door. Then he stops. Waits.

I motion to the door leading from the cell to the main room.

“In there, please.”

There’s the slightest narrowing of his eyes as he assesses my please.

He walks into the next room and sits on the chair I’ve set out. He puts his hands behind his back. I ignore that. I’m not binding him.

When I circle around, Brady’s head swivels to follow. I’ve holstered my weapon, but his gaze dips to it, just for a split second, as if he can’t help himself.

“Detective Butler is going to remove your gag,” Mathias says. “If you wish to scream for help, please don’t restrain yourself on my account. It will give her the excuse to replace the gag, and me the excuse to get on with my day.”

Brady grunts. I read derision in that. He looks at Mathias, hears his diction, and smells weakness. Mathias is twice his age. A slender build. Graying hair and beard. An air of the bored aristocrat, the French accent on precisely articulated English adding to that sense of the bourgeois. Brady comes from wealth, but it’s new-world money, won by frontier ingenuity. In Mathias, he sees old-world rot and weakness. An old man, too, compared to him.

Brady’s grunt dismisses Mathias, and the older man’s eyes gleam.

“Remove the gag, please, Detective. Let us begin.”