Sometimes he would remember Tess the wrong way—her lifeless body wrapped around the steering wheel of her car, reduced to a grotesque arrangement of flesh and bone. He would remember her just the way he had found her, still warm, just after a drunken driver had put the steering column through her chest in a head?on collision. The red lights flashing, pouring onto the rain-slick, shiny, black street; the rank, bracing smell of petroleum; the blubbering, slurred, “I’m sorries” of the other driver; and the hurt, cold, and deep, and seemingly endless—all of it had clung to him.

At first his friends said he had bounced back quickly—up early every morning, concentrating on his cases like never before. He had become quieter at work—a little more garrulous socially. But eventually the forced cheerfulness at dinners with friends became nearly real. People stopped giving him books about grieving and depression. Now he had a smile for most every occasion, a joke or two like usual, and he no longer had to pretend at every party.

Dan had stopped seeing the counselor almost before he started. The counselor claimed that a

man’s life could become like an iced-over pond. A thin veneer on the surface that looked solid but a man could drown if he fell through. Well, Dan explained, putting on his coat after the last counseling session, “If I fall through I’ll swim on over to see you.”

It was a year after Tess’s death that his father died, but Dan didn’t feel like he had much more “stuffin’” to be knocked out of him, so he sucked it up and continued on.

He blew out the candle on the table, deepening the shadows. Without his cowboy boots he felt naked, but he had deliberately shed his little trademarks for the meeting. Remarkably he’d come without his hat.

He asked for water and corn tortillas with salsa, no real drink, pledging to keep this meeting short and keep it sober. This rather brash cash-delivery plan was amusing, but it had to work and it had to be completed in absolute secrecy. Although he and Maria had never actually done battle in the courtroom, their jousting confined to

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