EPILOGUE
Three Weeks Later
The physical therapy clinic on East Fourth Street smelled like rubber mats and determination, and James Sullivan was doing neither of those things justice.
Isla watched from the doorway as he worked through a set of resistance band exercises that his therapist, Travishad, designed specifically for the intercostal muscles around his healing ribs.
James's face held the controlled blankness of a man refusing to acknowledge pain, which Isla had learned to read as this hurts considerably and I will never admit it.
His flannel shirt was draped over a chair.
The old watch glinted on his wrist each time he extended the band.
“You’re early,” he said without looking up.
“You’re slow.”
“Travis says I’m ahead of schedule.”
“Travis is being kind because you scare him.”
James released the band and sat back on the bench, breathing in the measured way Dr. Patel had taught him—four counts in, hold, four counts out—the mechanical rhythm of a man whose ribs were still keeping a ledger but had begun, finally, to close the books.
He looked at her. The cut above his eyebrow had healed into a thin white line that would fade in a year.
The bruising along his left side—she’d seen it that morning, the mottled yellow-green finally receding into something that looked like a body recovering rather than a body cataloging damage—was almost gone.
He looked good. She was allowed to think that now, or at least she’d stopped pretending she didn’t.
“Brought you something,” she said, and held up the coffee from the place on Superior Street.
His coffee. The one she’d been buying for him since the ICU, when he couldn’t drink it and she’d drunk it herself standing beside his bed.
He could drink it now. He reached for it the way he always did—both hands, wrapping around the cup, the gesture of a Duluth man holding coffee the way other people held prayers.
She sat on the bench beside him. The clinic was quiet at this hour, midafternoon on a Tuesday, just them and Travis pretending to update charts at the front desk while clearly eavesdropping with the earnest transparency of a thirty-year-old who hadn’t yet learned to be subtle about it.
“Patel called,” James said between sips. “Cleared me for light duty in two weeks. Desk only. No fieldwork until June at the earliest.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Like a man who’s been given a desk sentence.
” His eyes crinkled at the corners—the expression she’d spent three years learning to read and could now identify from across a room, the ghost of humor that lived in the lines of his face the way the lake lived in the geography of this city.
Everywhere, once you knew where to look. “How’s the hand?”
Isla held up her left hand. The bandage was smaller now—just the ring finger, or what remained of it.
She’d lost everything above the second knuckle to frostbite, the tissue damage too severe by the time the paramedics got her off the ice and into the ambulance.
The doctors at St. Luke’s had been straightforward about it: the cold and the ropes had cut circulation for too long, and the body’s triage was merciless.
They’d saved the rest of her fingers, including the pinky that had been touch-and-go for two days, and the hypothermia had responded to rewarming without the cardiac complications they’d worried about.
She’d spent four days in the hospital. James had been in the room across the hall.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Weird. I keep reaching for things and the grip isn’t where my brain expects it to be. The doctor says the adaptation period is three to six months.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when someone asks if it hurts.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. She watched it happen the way she watched small weather events—the shift of pressure in a room when James Sullivan almost smiled.
He set the coffee down and his hand found hers on the bench between them, the way it had on the ice, the way it had in the ambulance, the way it had every day since.
His grip settled around hers—careful of the bandage, firm everywhere else—and neither of them remarked on it.
His things had migrated from a duffel bag on the couch to the closet to the bathroom shelf, the slow territorial creep of a man who was supposed to be recovering at his own place and hadn’t gone back to it yet.
Neither of them had discussed making it permanent.
Neither of them had discussed not making it permanent.
The conversation existed in the space between them the way it always had—present, patient, waiting for one of them to say it out loud.
They’d get there. She wasn’t in a rush.
The media had finally moved on. Three weeks of national coverage—the Lake Superior Killer, the FBI agent who’d survived him, the dramatic confrontation on the ice—had run its course through the news cycle and settled into the kind of retrospective long-form pieces that showed up in weekend magazine supplements.
Isla had declined every interview request. Ben had handled the official press briefings with the quiet competence that was starting to define his career, standing at the podium in his charcoal suit with Kate beside him, saying exactly enough and nothing more.
He was good at it. Better than Isla would have been, and she’d told him so.
Three publishers had reached out about a book deal.
Two from New York, one from Chicago, all offering the kind of money that suggested the market for true-crime survival narratives involving frozen lakes and serial killers was more robust than Isla would have guessed.
She’d read the emails. She’d considered them the way she considered most things—carefully, from multiple angles, with the analytical thoroughness that Kate called her greatest asset and Dr. Linden called a coping mechanism.
Maybe someday she’d write it. She could feel the shape of the story the way she felt the edges of a case—the arc of it, from Miami to Duluth, from one kind of failure to another kind of survival.
But today was still too close. The ice was still too real under her knees.
The sound of the chain—link after link feeding into the hole—still woke her at three in the morning, and she’d lie in the dark listening to James breathe beside her and wait for her hands to stop shaking.
The hands always stopped. The breathing always helped. The story would keep.
Kate had called her into the office the previous week—not the mandatory-leave conversation this time but something else entirely, delivered with the barely concealed satisfaction of a woman who’d been working back channels while her agent was recovering.
“The Bureau is forming a task force,” Kate had said, leaning back in her chair with her reading glasses folded on the desk—but this time the tell meant something different.
Not a conversation she didn’t want to have.
One she did. “Focused on cold cases in the Great Lakes region. Unsolved drownings, disappearances along the shoreline, maritime-adjacent homicides. Everything you’ve been building for the last three years, Isla.
Every pattern you pulled out of those coroner files and drowning reports. Someone upstairs finally listened.”
“And?”
“And they want you to lead it.”
Isla had sat with that for a long moment. The task force would mean staying in Duluth permanently—not the exile it had been three years ago, not the career purgatory she’d resented through her first winter and her second and halfway through her third. A choice, this time. Her choice.
She’d said yes.
The work had already begun. The preliminary review of Robert Brune’s likely victims had expanded from the twelve Isla had originally identified to a list of twenty-three—stretching back to 1979, spanning the shorelines of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, each case a drowning or disappearance that had been ruled accidental or gone cold for lack of evidence.
Twenty-three names. Twenty-three families who’d been told their loved ones had slipped on wet rocks or fallen from a dock or simply vanished near water that everyone knew was dangerous.
Isla intended to find them answers, however long it took.
Brune’s body had never been recovered. The lake was over seven hundred feet deep at the point where the chain had dragged him under, and the water temperature at depth hovered near freezing year-round—cold enough to preserve but dark enough to hide, the same conditions that had kept the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald intact on the bottom for half a century.
Dive teams had searched for a week before the ice conditions and the depth made it untenable.
The official report listed Robert Brune as deceased, presumed drowned, body unrecovered.
The lake had taken him the way it had taken everything he’d ever given it—completely, without remainder, offering nothing back.
Some part of Isla thought that was fitting. A larger part of her wished they’d pulled him up, if only so the families would have the certainty of a body. She understood what it meant to wonder. She’d been doing it her whole career.
***
They drove home along the lake. James in the passenger seat with his coffee and his careful breathing and the particular silence he carried that had stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like company.
The afternoon light was doing what April light did in Duluth—arriving tentatively, as though it wasn’t sure it was welcome yet, stretching long and pale across the water and the city and the ore docks that rose against the sky like the ribs of something enormous.
Isla stopped at a red light and looked out at Superior.
The lake was calm today—flat and gray-blue and so vast it swallowed the horizon, the same water that had nearly killed her and had killed the man who’d tried to feed her to it.
She’d hated this lake once. Hated this city, hated the cold, hated the assignment that had felt like a punishment for a mistake she could never undo.
Miami had been warm. Miami had made sense.
Miami had been the career she’d wanted and the life she’d planned and the version of herself that didn’t wake up at three in the morning listening to chains.
But Miami wasn't home. She could see that now with the clarity that came after almost dying, the particular focus of a woman who'd been on her knees on frozen water with an anchor at her feet and had survived to sit at a red light in a city that almost destroyed her and feel, for the first time in three years, like she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
The light changed. She drove.
Beside her, James set down his coffee and rested his hand on the center console, palm up, the quiet invitation he’d been making since the ice.
Isla took it. Her four-and-a-half fingers laced through his five, the grip imperfect and sure, and the lake stretched beside them—ancient, cold, keeping its secrets—as they drove through Duluth toward whatever came next.