I would need help to make it right. But who among the living could help me? Not my wife. I had tried to communicate with her for months and failed. Maggie had not seen me, either. No one living had, except for the dying boy, that one time. Who, then, could help me set things right?

With shame, I recognized my best hope—the person I had been most like when I was alive—and set out to find him.

I discovered Danny in Shenanigan’s, a dive bar off La-Salle Street a few blocks from the house where Connie and my sons lived. Danny and I used to stop there for a pop whenever we got called out on a run. It was a low-rent hole-in-the-wall, filled with old men pickling themselves to death and tired women who looked older than they were, yet probably felt even older than that.

I used to feel so at home when I pushed through the front door. The warm air would wrap around me, beckoning me inside. The old men would look up and call out my name, gesturing for me to join them. I was a hero in there, a man not yet put out to pasture. I had thought of the bar as a cocoon that protected me from the disappointments waiting outside its doors.

Now it seemed like little more than a waiting room for death, a place of false hope and seductive inertia. A place where life leaked away and people squandered the time they had left. A place to give up, then deaden yourself against the knowledge that you had given up.

The air was suffocating, heavy with the smell of unwashed clothing and stale beer. The regulars sat hunched on their stools, staring into glasses of liquor or beer, occasionally glancing up at an old television that flickered images without sound. Even time seemed to slow in some cruel show of power. So you wanted it all to end? Well, sit down, buster, and take a number. Because you’ve got a long wait ahead of you.

Danny sat at the far end of the bar. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, but he had three empty shot glasses arranged in front of him and two more on deck. He’d taken a break from the bourbon to nurse a pint of beer. I remembered just how the beer tasted: slightly bitter, slightly flat—as vaguely disappointing as the life you were trying to forget.

Had I really looked that beaten down when I had been one of them?

Danny spoke to no one. He never even looked up. I waited, perched on an empty stool nearby, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking, what he was feeling, trying to find a way in that I could connect to. All I could discern was blackness, as cold and unfathomable as the bottom of the sea. I knew I would never be able to penetrate his thoughts. He was too far gone. To me and to the world. He would be of no help in bringing justice to Alissa Hayes and the girl who now lay on a steel slab in the morgue, name unknown, attended to by strangers. I could not even tell if Danny saw the connection between the old and new murders.

Danny was darkness. Danny was lost to me.

I checked out the other customers. There were half a dozen patrons this early in the day, only one of them a woman. She was drinking alone in a corner, smoking cigarette after cigarette, determined to fill her body with enough poison to take her away from whatever it was that caused her such pain. Watching her, I experienced a stab of compassion so acute it was as if a knife blade had penetrated the core of my heart and scooped out a slice to offer her. I was filled with a deep and abiding love for what she had given the world and failed to receive in return.

As I stared at her, a scene unfolded in my mind. I was sharing in her memories: a not-yet-middle-aged woman, beauty fading from neglect, sitting by the bedside of a dying old man. She is holding his hand and murmuring away his fears, assuring him that he does not need to be afraid, she will stay with him and he will not be alone. His terror leaves him and the old man closes his eyes, finding refuge in the sleep of the comforted. There is love in the room, as tangible as the handmade quilt folded over the end of the bed. But I know, as surely as anything I have ever known, that when the old man dies and finds his peace, his love for his dutiful daughter will die with him—and she will be the one left alone.

Just as I reached the end of this memory with her, the woman in the bar looked up at me, as if I’d spoken to her. Had she seen me? Could she feel me there? I waited, stunned. But, no, she glanced down, shaking it off, then picked up a shot glass of amber liquid and drained it. The moment had passed. Our connection was severed.

We were both left alone.

No one here would be of help to me. While I had once treasured the warm glow that the shots of bourbon gave me and thought of them as blessed release, I saw now that the more these people drank, the denser the air around them grew, until they were trapped in a carapace of hopelessness that was closer to death than to living.

I had to get out of there.

I escaped and stood outside on the sidewalk, waiting for Danny to leave. I knew he would have to report to the station eventually, even with his new partner, Maggie, picking up the slack. But when he finally stumbled out half an hour later, he did not head to his car. He turned down the block and walked toward my old neighborhood, causing curtains to flutter in windows as he staggered past. I followed him, the tail end of an invisible parade, watching the gloomy cloud he carried from the bar lighten in the light of a crisp winter day.

When he reached my block, he leaned against a tree several houses down from my yard and stared at my front door. I knew no one was home. Connie was still at work, the boys still at school.

Why was he here?

Did Danny miss me that much?

I would be astonished if that was the case. Though we’d had a friendship right out of the academy, after his divorce he had withdrawn into a sullenness that had persisted ever since. He had talked very little over our years together, done even less, disappeared often, and seldom expressed an opinion about the cases we were given. If I was unmotivated, Danny was petrified, light-years ahead of me when it came to inertia. No wonder we had been sloppy and closed so few cases while working together.

I had no illusions. Danny had not cared for me.

I could do nothing but wait while he stared at my house, grappling with unknown desires. Nearly half an hour passed before I saw what Danny had been waiting for: my wife’s car pulled up in our driveway, all the way up to the top of it, near the side door, in a place that had been cluttered with bicycles and sports equipment when I was alive. Connie climbed out of the driver’s side, then the passenger door opened and a man I had never seen before stepped out. He was tall and trim, with graying hair, and wore gold-rimmed glasses that made him look kind. He was a few years older than Connie. He followed her to the side of the house, his back turned to the neighbors as she fumbled to unlock the back door and let them both inside.

What was my wife doing at home in the middle of the day? Who was this man?

Danny stayed in the shadows of his watching place, but I had no such scruples. Invisibility has its advantages and I was curious. What secret lives we all lead, I thought.

I approached the kitchen door with no sense of guilt, nor could I feel any sense of jealousy, either. Such worldly feelings had apparently left me, along with resentment and the other petty emotions that erode our ability to love.

If someone else loved Connie, I would be glad for her. I had loved my wife once, and I felt a need, still, to look after her and my sons as best I could, perhaps to make up for how little I had looked after them when I was alive. Besides, I understood that I was gone from her life and that what she now thought of me was irrelevant. Connie’s life went on—and she deserved to be loved in a way I had never been able to give her.

I stayed only long enough to see that this man had been in my home before. He was not a stranger passing through. He belonged. Connie left him alone in the kitchen, yet he moved from cabinet to table to refrigerator with ease, pulling out plates and glasses, pouring wine, setting out a platter of cheese and slicing a pear while he waited for my wife to reappear. When she returned, she was wearing a pale blue nightgown and a matching robe edged with lace.

“I knew you would look beautiful in it,” the man said to her. He pulled her to him and buried his face in her hair, uncaring that it was streaked with gray, seeing only my wife’s beauty.

Connie put her arms around him and they kissed, then the man laughed and picked up a slice of pear. He fed Connie half, and ate the rest himself. “Are you happy?” he asked.

She nodded, beyond words, and my heart swelled with joy for my wife. I had never seen her look so beautiful; I had never felt her feel so beautiful before.

“How long do we have?” the man asked. I could tell that he was a kind man, a man unencumbered by lies or other obligations. A man with the freedom to think of nothing at this moment but my wife, and her loveliness, and the time they had together.

“The boys will be home in two hours,” she said. “You must have all your clothes back on by then.” She laughed. “They’ll be happy you’re back in town.”

He bent down and kissed her, enfolding her in his arms, and I knew the time had come for me to leave. This was no longer my life and this scene was not destined to be my memory.

It was time to let Connie go. Forever.

I left my old house with an unexpected feeling of freedom and a certainty that my time there was done. I would return, I knew, to watch my boys grow into men, but I would not and could not be the one responsible for them. I knew now that someone else would. What I had failed to do, this man would do for me, repairing my inattention, showing them love, shepherding them into adulthood. And he would do a better job than I could ever have done.

I felt nothing but gratitude toward him.

As I passed the tree where Danny stood brooding under the branches, still staring at my house, I patted my old partner on the back. He jumped, his reaction dulled by alcohol. A goose had walked over his grave.

I was both bemused and sad for him. Whatever dreams you had about Connie are gone, my friend, I thought. You have my sympathies.

Danny had finally had enough. He pulled his coat tightly around him and shivered, then stumbled over the tree roots as he fell back into the sunlight. He marched to his car with the exaggerated posture of a drunk, fooling no one who saw him stagger by. I hitched a ride back to the station with him, exuberant with a freedom I had not expected, ready for something new.

I discovered a childish joy in examining the backseat, a place where I had often shoved perpetrators or relegated bums but never actually sat myself.

I found wads of gum parked on torn vinyl, scraps of paper bearing phone numbers, crumpled business cards, initials scratched into plastic. People were funny, I thought. They had a need, somehow, to prove that they had been there. They placed such importance on a cumbersome existence that I now knew was merely one form of many.

For the first time since my passing, I felt a stirring of joy that I was what I was and that I was where I was. And at that moment, a door opened in my mind. It gave off a light. I tried to cling to my epiphany, but it evaporated.

And yet, it promised me hope.