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Can you stay there? I’ll send over three more items to be tested. He paused, then added, Official records for Fleming have been compromised. Can you find his DNA in Coroner’s Office records?

Dr. Harris replied immediately. I’ll stay. Doubt it re: Fleming, but will try.

“What is it?” asked Amelia when he put down his phone.

But Gabri had just arrived to take their orders. Armand, after pausing to think for a moment, pointed to the menu and said, as though asking a question about one of the specials, “Can you take Sam and Fiona Arsenault’s utensils when you clear their table? Don’t touch them yourself, and make sure you know which is which.”

He looked up at Gabri and smiled. Gabri, to his credit, caught on quickly. He wrote something on his pad, and said, “And for dessert?”

“Put them in unused plastic baggies, seal them, label them, and bring them to me, please.”

“Good choice,” said Gabri.

After he left, Gamache told Amelia what had happened in her absence.

“But why the cutlery?”

Armand glanced over to the siblings, then told her their suspicions.

“You mean one of them could be related to John Fleming?” she said, her voice low. “But didn’t Inspector Beauvoir say it couldn’t be Sam because of the timing?”

Gamache looked at the young woman across from him, inviting her to think harder. He believed she had it in her to get at the answer. He believed she had it in her to do just about anything.

He’d recognized that as soon as he’d read her application to the Sûreté Academy.

And yet, knowing that, he’d still rejected her. For the greater good, he’d told himself. Or maybe it was the lesser evil.

But as he’d sat on the bench overlooking Three Pines, holding his father’s unfinished book, Armand couldn’t escape the truth. He’d rejected Amelia Choquet not because of her, but because of what lived in one of the files he kept locked in the basement.

At the age of seventeen, Amelia’s father was drunk when he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and drifted into the oncoming lane. A car, heading in the other direction, swerved to miss him, ran off the road, rolled, and hit a tree.

The occupants of the car died at the scene. The occupants of the car were Armand’s parents.

The young man at the wheel had gone on to marry later in life and have a child. Just one. He gave her the same name as the woman he’d killed.

Amelia. After Amelia Gamache. Mama.

It was, Armand knew, an attempt at atonement. Though it was so feeble it had enraged him. That the man who’d killed his parents thought such a tiny gesture could even begin to right the balance.

Reading her application, he had recognized that the Sûreté Academy was almost certainly Amelia Choquet’s last hope.

Knowing this, he’d turned her down. Tossed her, and her file, into the rejected pile. Tossed her back into the sewer that was inner-city Montréal, to sink slowly below the surface.

He’d ultimately changed his mind and given her that chance. He’d done it for his mother. For his father. For the man they’d hoped he’d become. A brave man in a brave country.

The fact he’d initially turned Amelia Choquet down still haunted him. It was an act of very slow, deliberate murder. Armand was shocked, appalled at himself, and deeply ashamed. But it had an unexpected benefit. It forced him to go deep inside his own cave. And look at what stinking, putrid, rancid creature was curled up there. Watching and waiting.

It gave him insight into the evil that decent people could do. John Fleming was a monster, without a doubt. But Armand Gamache had his own monster. He’d seen it. He’d fed it.

He’d put it back in its cage. But he still had the key.

Armand had had no idea that Amelia knew this connection until they’d been at the airport and she’d pledged to protect Reine-Marie. It was an acknowledgment of what her family owed to his. She grappled with the sins of the father. Even as Armand confronted the sins of the son.

He knew now why she’d returned to Three Pines. It was to protect him.

Their meal, chosen by Gabri, arrived at that moment. Armand was about to tell her not to eat, but Amelia didn’t seem to notice it was even there. Her lightning mind was going over and over the facts, considering, dismissing, honing.

Until she had it.