“John, are you listening to me?”
      Monica’s impatient voice startled him out of his contemplation of the ceiling tiles.  He looked up at her, his eyes carefully avoiding the open file on his desk.  A futile exercise, he could see its contents reflected perfectly in his mind’s eye.  The rest of his son’s life was a knot of blurry pain in the back of his mind, but the contents of this case file he could recite by heart.  A thousand other things he’d locked away, but this he could remember.
      “John?”
      “What?” He said and knew his tone was harsher than Monica deserved, but couldn’t seem to care.
      “How do you want me to write this up?” She asked gesturing to the Dukes file in front of her.
      For a moment he didn’t reply, but some strange impulse, some need to remember forced him out of his chair.  He pulled his coat off its hook and picked up his briefcase.
      “Write it however the hell you want, Monica.” He said and walked out the door without so much as a glance back.

      He was in Annapolis before he realized where he was going.  The day had turned out warmer than expected and on the Bay Bridge he rolled down the truck windows and let the wind and warm sun carry way the edge of tension.  But mostly it made him think about her.  His wife.  Ex-wife.  His son’s mother.  None of them sounded right anymore.  He should start using her name again.  Kate.  Kathleen.  She was that long before she was any of the others. Warm sun on his face and a bright blue sky arching over head were all it took to make him think of her.  Funny how he always associated sunny days with her though he’d met her in the coldest place he’d ever lived.
      He wondered if he should be troubled by the fact that he could close his eyes and still see the exact color of her hair.  So many other things he had forgotten.  How she drank her coffee.  What her voice sounded like when she told him she loved him.  Why she left him.  But with no effort he could bring that color to mind. 
      Far too light to be black, too gold to be red, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave it at brown.  He remembered the fine strands spread out across her pillow, the drape of soft curls over his bare chest.  He remembered tracing the black strands, and the red and the ten shades of brown, watching them merge to produce the warm rich brown, the brown of old wood and expensive furniture, of scotch and bourbon and sour mash aged for decades. 
      If he could force himself to stop at just contemplating the color, he would be okay.  He wouldn’t be driving out here on a whim.  But he couldn’t.  His discipline always failed, and he would find himself mediating on her, trying to bring all the scattered memories together.
      He’d always thought of her as small, but she wasn’t.  She was taller than Scully, a little shorter than Reyes, but he couldn’t quite apply average to her.   She was small-boned though and lean from years of soccer and basketball and tennis.  He wasn’t used to that.  Before her, there had been Georgia belles who only went outdoors for garden parties and lived and died by the state of their manicures.   She’d grown up hiking in the Berkshires and exercising racehorses at Saratoga during summer vacations. 
      Kate was another breed of woman entirely.  What had his father said about her?  “She’s a nice girl, but you’ll never be able to control her.”  He couldn’t imagine why he would want to.  She was a challenge, and if there was anything he couldn’t resist, it was that.  Other women had challenged him, but they were simply a challenge to attain.  Once you had them, there was nothing left.  With her it was barely a beginning.  She was difficult to know, hard to understand, impossible to predict.  He had to push himself father in so many new directions with her.  Mentally, physically, he had been already been pushed to the limit by his stint in the Marines.  But she opened some other dimension in him, some undiscovered country that had existed within him but without him ever knowing.
      He met her crossing the quads at Syracuse.  She nearly took his head off with a stray soccer ball and had stopped him to apologize.   Attraction sparked between them with such immediate physical pain he thought the ball had hit him.  All these years later, he still didn’t know if it had been the same for her, but she hadn’t gone back to her game.  His hesitant invitation for coffee had stretched into dinner and then drinks and then an awkward kiss at her front door.  He had thought himself beyond uncertainty in romance, but all the adolescent anxiety came back when he met her.
      She was a third year medical student and he was finishing his thesis.  He was 28; she was 24.  Neither of them had time for a serious relationship, but they had one anyway.  They studied together, sometimes not talking for hours.  He liked that she didn’t feel compelled to fill empty air with empty conversation, that she was secure in herself.  She liked that he took her work seriously, that he didn’t want to change her .  They spent more time asleep together than they did awake.
      One morning in May when the nerves had finally set in over his upcoming defense, she woke him up before dawn, and they drove the three hours to Saratoga.  It was barely 8 when they arrived, and she took him to the backstretch of the old race track to watch the horses galloping through the early morning mist.
      They were leaning against the rail content in their silence when an old friend of hers found them and asked her: “Ride this crazy little colt for me.  None of these new kids have your hands.”
      The horse the old man brought out didn’t look little to John.  He was 900 pounds of quivering muscle covered by a gleaming coat the color of a new penny.  She allowed herself to be thrown into the saddle, and the colt began an immediate fractious dance, tossing his head and swerving nervously.  But she spoke to him, too softly for anyone else to hear, stroking his neck gently and keeping one hand light on the reins.  And after a minute, the colt calmed and strode out confidently to the track.
      They galloped around the old dirt oval, her form nothing but a small blur on the horses broad back.  If not for the pounding tattoo of the animal’s hooves, he would have sworn they never touched the ground.  She seemed not to move as though she was directing the horse with her mind and not her body.  Rounding the far turn, the colt broke into a blinding run without so much as a signal.  They flew under the wire, not two separate entities, but one organism moving in perfect graceful concert with relentless power and some indescribable thrill that threatened to burn him alive.
      “That’s what we call class,” the old man muttered.   “You can have the perfect horse, the fastest horse in the world, but ain’t nothing without a rider.  And the best rider in the world can’t do a damn thing without the horse.  The horse trusts his rider to guide him and the rider trusts the horse to keep him safe with 10 tons of horseflesh traveling at 30 miles an hour right over his shoulder.  With the right man in the saddle, a horse will find speed he didn’t know he had, speed he shouldn’t have.  On the right horse, a man becomes more than himself, more than a slow fragile creature held fast to the earth.  He becomes a god, a king, an eagle without wings.”
       John wasn’t sure if the old man was talking about two of them or she and the horse, but he could only nod vaguely in agreement.  That’s when he knew he loved her.
      They barely made it to a secluded spot on the road home before they were tearing at each other’s clothes.  She had her hands at his belt impatient fingers fumbling with the stubborn leather.  He pushed her hands away and looked in her eyes, paler blue than his, the color of the Mediterranean off the coast of Lebanon.  He never thought he‘d want to see that color again.  “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely.
      “I love you too,” she whispered back and kissed him hard.  “Now take your damn pants off.”

      It took him nearly three hours to reach the Chesapeake’s eastern shore from D.C.   It seemed longer with nothing but water and pine trees on either side of the road.  But for the bay gleaming through the trees on one side of the road, it could have been fourteen years ago.  The year he’d moved to the city to join the force, and she’d stayed in Syracuse to finish medical school.  How many weekends had he driven the five hours through the valleys of eastern New York just to spend a few hours with her.  He’d thought the 250 miles separating them was the worst thing that would ever happen to them.
      The sun was beginning to sink low in the bright blue sky when he pulled into the driveway of her house.  He got out of the car and waited for her on the porch swing.  At some point the sun and the sound of the water and the cool breeze must have lulled him into a half-sleep because he opened his eyes to find her standing at the top of the porch steps staring at him.
      He almost didn’t recognize her.  She’d cut her hair so short the curls formed a careless halo around her head.  Instead of button-downed professional suits, she had returned to her college day uniform of sandals, ragged jeans and an oversize checked shirt.  Christ, it was like the last 15 years hadn’t happened seeing her like this.  When he fully focused, he realized it was  trick of the eye or mind.  Her once clear blue eyes were shadowed, and her face masked even from him.  She was stiller, more self-contained, more careful of herself, her eyes sending a 'stay back' message to the world at large.  His fault.  But then, the sheer number of things that were his fault could stun a team of oxen.
      “You should have called,” she said quietly.
      “I though you might have asked me not to come,” he admitted.
      “I wouldn’t.”
      “I didn’t know.”
      “Now, you do.  Call next time.”
      He nodded.  Looking away, he let his eyes roam over the freshly cut lawn and the neat flower beds that were all that stood between the little cottage and the bay.  “Is that my shirt?”
      A ghost of a smile softened her mouth briefly.  “Do you want it back?”
      “No,” he said quickly.  “You look . . . good, relaxed.”
      She dipped her head slightly to acknowledge the compliment and joined him in silent contemplation of the front yard.
      “I was going to start some dinner,” she said finally.  “Have you eaten?”
      He shook his head and realized that he’d forgotten lunch in his mad urge to drive over here.
      It must have shown in his face because she gave him a stern look as she unlocked the door.  “You’ve lost weight.”
      “I’ve been working,” he said and followed her into the house.
      Inside the door two familiar figures pounced on him.  The older of the two dogs was content to simply butt its head against his knees, but the younger put its front paws on his chest and tried to lick his face.
      He pulled the dog off him and knelt to pet each of them.  “I’m surprised Morgan remembers me.”
      “Shepherds are smart dogs,” she said noncommittally and headed for the kitchen.
      He followed and leaned against the counter while she set ingredients on the counter.  The kitchen was oddly lit in the late afternoon sun and turned her brown curls almost red. Like the rest of the house it was simply furnished with plain but comfortable furniture.  One wall of the living room had a painting of the paddocks at Saratoga in the early morning.  The rest were covered with bookshelves and large windows providing a view of the bay.  He wandered over to one and looked at a framed photograph on one of the shelves. It took him a moment to process the picture.
      It was the five of them.  She was sprawled in a deck chair with Luke curled up asleep in her lap.  He was leaning over her chair, one hand on Luke’s foot the other tangled in her hair, and she was turned towards him smiling at whatever he said.  Both dogs, Morgan just a puppy, lay at their feet.
      For a disconcerting moment he heard nothing but the blood pounding in his ears and felt the world spin furiously.  He steadied himself with one hand on the bookcase and looked desperately at the other pictures.  Some of them were of her family, but the majority were of Luke or the three of them together.  He stumbled back to the kitchen.
      She looked up from the head of lettuce she was shredding and took in his pale face.  “John?”
      He swallowed hard.  “How . . . how do you keep those pictures out?”
      “What did you want me to do with them?” She asked and turned back to the salad.  “Stick them in a box and forget about them?”
      “I . . .no.  They’re just hard to look at.”
      “Yes,” she agreed.  “It is hard.”
      “Then, why . . .”
      She slammed the knife down onto the counter and turned to him eyes blazing.  “Because it fucking happened, John.  We had a son.  He’s dead, but pretending he never existed won’t make it stop hurting.”
      “I never. . .”
      “Say his name,” she said furiously.  “Say ‘Luke’ and I’ll believe that.”
      He stared at her and for the second time in that week felt like someone had reached into his chest and pulled out his heart.  Something in his expression must have conveyed that to her because suddenly the tension drained from her posture and her eyes stopped spitting blue fire at him.
      “I’m sorry; that was cruel,” she said quietly looking at her feet.
       He shook his head.  “I’m sorry too. . . I just can’t.”
      “You feel how you feel, John.  You don’t have to apologize for that.  Just because it isn‘t how I want you to feel doesn‘t make it wrong.”
      “How do you want me to feel?” He asked.
      “It doesn‘t matter,” she said and turned away again.
      “Then what does?”
      She looked up at him in confusion.
      “Do you miss me at all?”
      She laughed bitterly.  “Only every day.” 
      “Then why . . .”
      “Because I can live with one ghost, John.  I can’t live with two.”
      “I don’t understand.”
      She sighed impatiently.  “Damn it, what do you want to hear? That I still love you?  Okay, I do.  I still love you, John.  Does that make you happy?” She asked.  He started to reply, but she cut him off.
      “But that doesn’t mean a damn thing.  You can’t or won’t deal with your grief.  I did.  I got through it, and I can’t be with you if every day I have to watch you sleepwalk through your life and pretend that nothing happened.”
      “You got through it?  It was just that easy,” he snapped back.
      “No, it was the hardest fucking thing I’ve ever had to do in my life.  But I did it. You didn’t give me a choice, John.  From the moment Luke went missing, you disappeared too.  You had the case, and everything else stopped mattering.  I had nothing.  I had the dogs to feed,” she said with biting sarcasm.   “I had to face it.  I had to try to get through it.  What did you think I was going to do? Sit in my tower and pine away?  Kill myself?  You know how I feel about Sylvia Plath.”
      His flinched turned into a smile.  “You always said she needed therapy and a kick in the ass.”
      She snorted.  “Yeah, well, you were my kick in the ass.”  She shook her head impatiently.  “God, I was so mad at you.”
      “I felt like I failed you,” he admitted softly.  “That I should have been able to fix it.  I couldn’t . . . face you knowing that I’d failed.  Working the case . . . it was the only thing I knew how to do.  What else good could I have been?”
       “You could have been there.  You could have let me in.  That’s all you had to do.  Just be in the same room with me and act like it happened.”  She paused a looked away.  “I’m sorry I didn‘t tell you that then,” she said regretfully.
      “I don’t know if would have been able to hear it,” he said thoughtfully.
      “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to say it,” she answered softly.  “Half of what kept me going was hating you.”
      “Do you still?”
      “A little bit.”
      They let silence stretch between them until the oven timer startled them out of their reveries.  She handed him a plate and silverware.  “Let’s eat on the deck.”
      They ate in silence. She was watching the water over his shoulder, and he was watching her eyes look everywhere but at him.
      “You’ve stopped looking at me again,” he said softly and brushed an errant curl away from her face with a hesitant finger.  He always wondered why she had never minded his big callused hands.  They looked so painfully awkward next to her fine bones.  Her hands were small but strong with narrow palms and long graceful fingers.  A doctor’s hands, perfect for comforting someone in pain.  For wiping the tears from a child’s face.  For kneading the tension out of a man’s shoulders at the end of a long day. 
      She smiled wryly.  “I’ve exhausted my supply of emotional honesty,” she said and reached up to pull his hand away from her face.
      “I have a little bit left.”
      That caught her attention and she met his eyes.  “Do you?”
      He nodded.  “What you said earlier . . . I miss you every day.  And I still love you too.”
      She reached over and touched his hand briefly, but as she was pulling away, he caught her hand and held on to it.  “If I . . .if I can get through this.  Grieve, come to terms, whatever.  Do you think we could try again?”
      He would rather have cut his own throat than see the wave of pain wash over her face.  “John . . . I don’t know.  I don’t even know how we would start.  I don’t know if I can do that to myself again.”
      “But would you want to try?” He persisted.
      “John . . . whatever it is you’re looking for . . . truth, justice, redemption, whatever it is.  I can’t give it to you.  If I could, we wouldn’t be divorced.  Part of me, doesn’t even understand how I got through.  I don’t know what to do for you or how to help you.  And I can’t go back to being an afterthought in someone else’s life.”
      “What about love?” He asked quietly.  “Can you give me that?”
      She looked at him steadily, eyes wide and sad for a long moment.  “I can.  I don’t know that I want to,” she said slowly and regretfully.
      “Will you try?”
      “Do you have any idea of what you’re asking?  The scars you want me to rip open.”
      It took nearly more strength than he had to meet her eyes in that moment, but he did.  “I know what I’m asking.  I . . . I’m not selfish about many things,” he admitted and she inclined her head in rueful acknowledgement.  “I know sometimes that’s a flaw as much as selfishness, but it’s not who I am.  I know this would hurt you.  God knows, I’ve hurt you more than anyone should have to bear.  And I want the chance to make that right.  You don’t have to promise me anything or feel like you owe me anything.  I just want to know if you’ll try.”
      Her eyes watered and she pressed her lips stubbornly together to keep them from trembling, but she nodded.  He gently brushed the tear away and as she started to shake with the effort of repressing her tears, pulled her into his arms.
      A long-frozen part of him thawed when she didn’t fight him, but wrapped her arms tightly around him and buried her head in his shoulder.  They sat there perfectly still for he didn’t know how long.  He forced himself not to jump when he felt her hand absently begin stroking the back of his neck.
      “Do you remember that day I took you to Saratoga?” She asked quietly.
      He nodded.  “I was thinking about it on the way out here.”
      “When I got off that horse and saw the look on your face, I was so afraid.”
      “Why?”
      “I knew that you loved me.  That I loved you.  That it was forever.  I realized my life had changed irrevocably, and I had never even noticed until then.” 
      “That’s why you tried to rip my pants off?”
      She laughed and the whisper of her breath against his ear made him shudder.  “No, I think that was just lust.”
      “Lust is good sometimes.”
      “I’ve always been rather fond of it.”  She leaned back to look him in the eye and for the first time gave him a real smile.
      “We’re a strange pair,” she said.
      “Yeah, we are, but I’ve always been rather fond of us.”
      She laughed again.  “Are you driving back to the city tonight?”
      He nodded.  “I have to work tomorrow.  I didn’t exactly plan this.”
      “Why did you come out here?”
      “An agent thought she saw a similarity between . . .Luke’s,” he choked on the name, and it came out rusty, but he got it out, “case and a new case.”
      “Was there?” She asked.
      He shook his head.  “Nothing that panned out.” 
      “Do you want to talk about it?”  Her indifferent tone gave him pause.
      “You don’t care, do you?  You don’t care who killed him.”
      “No. Knowing wouldn’t bring him back.  It wouldn‘t change anything or make anything right.”
      “I wish I could feel that way.”
      “No, you don’t.”
      “You’re right I don’t.  It has to matter otherwise what I do, who I am doesn’t matter.”
      She squeezed his shoulder lightly.  “I understand, John.  I really do.  I just don’t agree with you.  Who you are and what you do, they don’t begin and end with Luke’s death.  You’re a thousand times more complicated than that.  This is what I’ve been talking about.  You could have shut me out, and I wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” she said frankly.  “But when you shut yourself away, there wasn’t any reason to stay.”
      He didn’t know how to answer that.  Part of him wanted desperately to believe her words that he could finally lay this to rest and move on.  He wanted that, but wasn’t sure he was ready.
      “Whatever happens,” he said after a few minutes.  “I want to know that we did the best we could.  I don’t want to be afraid of what I feel anymore.”
      “You don’t want much, do you?” She said.
      He laughed at that.  “What do you want?”
      “World peace and the fastest racehorse in the world.”
      He gave her a quick smile but refused to let her turn away or evade his question.  “Tell me.”
      She was silent and studied the water.  “I want to take my life off hold,” she said finally.  “I told you that I’ve gotten on with my life.  And I have, mostly.  I can think about Luke.  I even talk about him sometimes, and I don’t cry or get depressed.  But I don’t care about anything.  I don’t feel sad, but then I don’t feel much of anything.   I moved here to have a smaller practice.  So I could work less and live more, but I don’t live more; I just  . . . work less.  I want to start feeling things again.  To start caring again.  I want out of this limbo I’ve been living in.”
      “I think it’s the same thing, what we want,” he said.
      She put her head back on his shoulder, but finally nodded slightly in reply.  “Maybe.”
      It wasn’t much of an answer, but he heard the edge in her voice that told him he had pushed as far as he should tonight.  But it was enough.  More than he’d had in years, more than he could have hoped for.  He’d started out this morning with nothing, his life at a dead end, but now he had a fragile spark of hope, a faint light in the dark depths of his soul where he’d hidden all the things that were too painful to bear.  It was a small thing, but it might as well have been the world.