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and turned back to him.
    “I will say this one time, so listen up.” She took a deep breath. “If you are waiting for me to tell you that I did not love Dylan, you are going to be very disappointed. I did love him. I loved him with all my heart. I planned to marry him and grow old with him. When he was killed, I thought I’d never feel that way about anyone, ever again. I accepted that.”
    “Annie . . .”
    “Don’t. You started this, you will let me finish.”
    She came down off the steps.
    “The first time I met you, I knew how I was going to end up feeling about you. Don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. But I met you, and I thought, Well, now, how about that? Lightning can strike twice, apparently. Then we began dating, and for a time, I was confused, because I wasn’t sure I understood how anyone could be lucky enough to find that kind of love more than once. And I knew that I loved you, pretty much right from the time we started seeing each other. There was just something in you . . . something so good and honest, something that just spoke to my heart.” She took a long breath.
    “Don’t take this the wrong way, but there was something else I saw in you that I saw in Dylan as well, and I don’t mean this to sound as if I’m comparing you to him. I’m not. It wasn’t that you were alike. It’s more in the way he cared about what he did. It might sound corny, but he took the whole business of fighting crime very seriously. He was always on the side of the victims, always stood for those who couldn’t stand for themselves. I loved that in him. I saw all those same things in you—that same determination, that same dedication—and I loved it in you, too. I really felt that in spite of what had happened, I would have my happily-ever-after. With you.”
    Evan rubbed the back of his neck, then shoved his hands into his pockets. He just didn’t know what to say.
    “I’m sorry that you felt left out on Friday. I have to be very honest with you—I did feel uncomfortable, after a while, the way Dylan’s family was turning my sister’s wedding into a sort of memorial service. But you have to understand that this is a very close family. In some ways, they are still trying to come to grips with Dylan’s death. His father will probably never accept it. He’s still reeling from it. I feel bad for all of them. It hasn’t been easy.”
    “You didn’t seem to be protesting too much when I saw you.”
    “What was I supposed to do, Evan? Tell them all to just get over it, to get on with their lives?”
    “You didn’t have to sit there all night and be part of the wake. It looked to me that you fit right in.”
    “I did not know what else to do, Evan. I did not know how to gracefully walk away. They see me as a link to him. Especially Thomas. Dylan loved me; they have to love me, too. If he hadn’t died when he did, I’d have been one of them.”
    “You are one of them.”
    “This is a family that has been shattered by a death they believe wasn’t supposed to happen. It makes it all the more difficult for them to accept because they still don’t really know what happened that night. That wound is still festering. That one of their own was murdered, and none of them—none of the big bad FBI Shieldses—has been able to bring his killer to justice.”
    “Someone else said something like that, someone I was talking to near the bar. He said that the FBI still didn’t know what went wrong.”
    “True. And it haunts everyone, everyone who knew him.”
    “Are you haunted by him, Annie?”
    “Not
by
him, maybe, but
for
him, I guess. I wish I did know what happened that night. I wish I did know who killed him, and why. I wish there could be justice for him. It was set up to look like it was part of that undercover drug deal, but no one ever thought that felt right, and no one has been able to come up with an alternative that makes any sense, either.”
    “What didn’t feel right? It’s not