One Cold Night

which ultimately counted for more than a pretty face.
    “It’s going to be all right,” Dave said, pulling his thumb gently along Susan’s neck until it rested in the crook behind her ear.
    Her back rose and fell with a deep breath and exhalation.
    Together they watched Lisa sleep. Dave noticed now that Lisa was wearing a necklace, a chain with a small gold crucifix. He recognized it as the gift Susan had received at her first Communion when she was a child; she kept it in her jewelry box on her dresser andhad shown it to him once. He wondered how Lisa would react when she woke up and found it there. But Lisa’s faith, or even Susan’s, was not his battle to wage. He vowed to keep quiet on the subject and accept whatever they wanted to believe, though in his mind he saw that crucifix flying across the room on a wave of sound that was Lisa’s voice.
    Susan turned again to look at him.
    “Thank you, Dave,” she whispered.
    His mind raced. What was she thanking him for? He hadn’t saved Lisa; he had simply found her while she was in the process of saving herself. But then Susan reached up to touch his face and he knew. Beneath her terror for Lisa, she had been as concerned about their marriage as he had been. Hours had passed since her confession to him, and whatever betrayal she may have committed had taken on a more intricate patina. He was beginning to understand that the lies she had told herself were more harmful than those she had told him. What they had together before, and what they had now, was real. Lisa was alive. Susan was safe. There was nothing to forgive; they had come close to losing each other, briefly, but had each other back.
    They were whole and together, a family.
    Peter Adkins was on his way to a psychiatric prison, where he belonged.
    And the groom, finally, was dead.

Epilogue
    Sunday, 11:00 a.m.
    An autumn chill had set in. Dave huddled with Susan and Lisa for warmth. The cemetery’s green lawns were dusted with dry leaves that spiraled at the slightest wind as they watched Becky Rothka’s mahogany coffin being lowered on ropes into the broken earth. Dave felt the steep descent of a long-delayed remorse. Remorse and guilt; it was plain wrong and unfair that Becky had suffered. And died. And been left in a stranger’s earth, alone. In the past few days, he had discovered that grief came in waves. He had never met this girl, yet he felt he knew her; her absence in the world had left a terrible scar.
    Lisa’s life was his redemption. Rallying, she had eaten and rested and talked through every part of the story she could remember in a recovery Dave thought both swift and remarkable. Aside from cuts and scrapes, mostly from walking barefoot through the forest but also from an accidental slip of Peter Adkins’s knife against her inner arm when he cut the ropes on the bed, her injuries were internal, emotional. She washaving trouble accepting a series of ill-fitting facts: that Peter Adkins was her biological father; that he had kidnapped her but was not the groom; that he had killed once before, in drowning his brother, but had no apparent intention of killing her; that he was mentally ill with two serious, hereditary conditions; and that he had confusedly taken the advice of an even sicker man who had directed him to lead Lisa to the crude grave of another girl who had not been so lucky. If that was luck. The knot of contradictions was almost too much to unravel, but Dave was accustomed to the illogical byways of the criminal mind. It was not, however, something he wanted Lisa ever to get used to. She would be visiting with a child psychologist the next day so that each thread of the knot could be gently unfurled and examined. Next week she would return to school, at which point Susan planned to spend her first full day at her chocolaterie since Lisa disappeared. They would go back... well, not quite to normal but something much like it.
    Across the lawn stood the Rothka family: Marie, Charles and Charlie. Charles was as gray as Marie was gaunt, both rigid with grief beside their daughter’s grave. Charlie at twelve was a large, burgeoning boy; his ruddy cheeks and messy dark hair looked fresh from sport with a gaggle of friends, anything to keep his mind off what had become the spine of his family life for the past year. His sister was gone. His sister was dead. Now she was buried. Charlie Rothka kept his hands jammed in his pockets and stood a full yard from his parents, avoiding