The Darkest Evening of the Year

the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions.”
    Dear God, she heard nothing awkward in that. In that was the perfect truth of her eight years in rescue, as she could never have put it into words.
    For a time they didn’t need to speak, and they lavished on the dog, on this living Nickie, the affection they felt for each other.
    “Michael fled the country,” she said at last, needing to finish the account. “They never found him. Although he didn’t go back to Argentina, he had established quite an alibi in Buenos Aires. His friends there swore he’d been with them on the night. Of course that wouldn’t work after I’d seen him and survived. What kind of people were they, swearing to a lie known to be a lie, when swearing to it didn’t matter anymore?”
    Having claimed his inheritance by marrying and by fathering a child, Michael had no further use for a family. By law, a wife had a claim on a portion of his wealth, as did a child. Amy and Nicole were not assets, but liabilities, and he needed to purge them from his books.
    He could have hired someone for this little accounting job, but he must have worried that a paid killer would have no scruples about engaging in blackmail. The savagery of the murders suggested that Michael had done the deed not solely to avoid being vulnerable to extortion, but also because killing gave him pleasure.
    The police discovered he had prepared for the possibility that he might become a suspect in spite of his tightly woven alibi. In the three years preceding the night, he had gradually transferred most of his fortune out of the United States, moving it through a complex series of investments and entities designed to launder it and fold it away under an alternate identity that could never be traced.
    Devastated by the actions of their son, the senior Coglands had been kind to Amy; they would have treated her as if she were their daughter. But her taste for luxury had been lost, and the lifestyle in which she once delighted now appealed to her no more than would have a diet of vinegar and ashes.
    Amy had cashed out what comparatively little equity Michael had left in such mortgaged assets as their houses. Even that felt too much like blood money, and she knew she would have to find something to do with her life that would make her funds clean again.
    Michael’s cold calculation and the extreme brutality with which he had treated his victims argued that he would not remain safely on some tropical island, lazing in the sun with piña coladas for the rest of his life. By fighting back, she had forced him into hiding; worse, literally and figuratively, she had wounded him .
    When a man has no humility, pride is the thing that fills the void. He might feel that the wound she’d dealt to his pride required payback, and in time he might come looking for her.
    Consequently, her attorney was able to convince the court that the government needed to assist her in the creation of a new identity and forever seal the records involving her name change.
    She had lived as Amy Harkinson since she was three, and she had all but forgotten the last name pinned to her shirt when she’d been abandoned in the church at Mater Misericordiæ. Redwing .
    She was quite sure she had never mentioned it to Michael. Her history of tragedy embarrassed her, as if she were a waif imagined by Dickens. Rather than the full truth with all the melodrama of her abandonment, and rather than present herself as a woman of unknown parentage, she had preferred a white lie of omission, allowing him to believe she had been the Harkinsons’ child and had gone to the orphanage only after their death.
    Her attorney and the judge preferred she create a new name from whole cloth, but she had suffered panic attacks at the thought of a life without any touchstones to her past. The nuns at Misericordiæ cooperated by redacting the name Redwing from their records, and as best they could from memory.
    She had, then, also lost the sisters who had raised her. Until Michael was found, if ever he was, Amy dared not return to Mater Misericordiæ for a visit.
    She had come west. She bought a little bungalow. She became a bone to grief, gnawed thin, and a prisoner of loneliness, who for most of a year could find no way to escape