They hadn't come at regular intervals, but still, Jack McCoy had gotten used to them. Little cardboard cards with pictures of monuments, notable buildings, scenic vistas. They turned up in his mail, addressed in familiar spiky handwriting, no message, no return address. Sometimes days apart, sometimes two or three at once: the Washington Monument, a picturesque coastal hamlet, the Grand Canyon … no message, except the message that the cards themselves embodied. This is where I am. I'm okay.

I'm thinking about you.

The last one, the forty-eighth, had a picture of the Space Needle.

After a week, it was clear that was it. One post-card from each state, the last telling him I'm home. I'm okay.

I'm thinking about you.

Then nothing.

McCoy kept the postcards bundled together with a rubber band in the bottom drawer of his desk, on top of a sealed envelope of photographs and next to the scotch.

There was a stall selling tourist memorabilia, including postcards, near the courthouse. One day on impulse McCoy bought one showing the Statue of Liberty. He addressed it Regan Markham, and then stopped, with no idea where she was.

Finally he wrote Markham's Corner, Washington State, and his best guess at the zip code, and asked Colleen for a stamp.

He wondered if it would get to her. He wondered what message she'd take from it. I'm still here. I'm okay.

I'm thinking of you.

It didn't come back addressee unknown. That was something.

That was all.

Regan could have called him. Office phone, home, his cell. She had all his numbers. She could have called him on any line, at any time.

She didn't. Just the postcards, until they stopped.

She'd left him, and she was gone, and no-one would have blamed McCoy for moving on. He told himself there had barely been anything between them to move on from. Some evenings, when there was absolutely nothing on his desk he could bury himself in, he flicked through his address book.

There were numbers in it that he could call, plenty of them.

There were numbers he knew he could get, with a minimal exercise of charm.

There was Connie Rubirosa. She was tall, and she had the same tenderness toward some of their young and hapless defendants that Regan had shown. She was stunningly beautiful, she was well on her way to being a brilliant attorney, and judging by the hours she put in, serious relationships were nowhere on her horizon.

McCoy toyed with the idea of exercising his charm in Connie's direction — hold her gaze a little too long, let his hand linger when he ushered her through a door, reach for a file or law report at the same time she did, all the old tried-and-tested stratagems from the Jack McCoy playbook. He toyed with the idea, until a witness erupted out of his chair in fury, and Connie told him soothingly to Calm down.

McCoy could hear Regan saying exactly the same thing in similar circumstances, flat and calm and utterly confident.

He stayed collegial and professional with Connie.

Abbie's temporary replacement, Gina Kerrigan, was smart and tough and a brawler in the courtroom, but so slender and delicate she bordered on the fragile. Watching her struggle with the heavy courthouse doors one morning, McCoy couldn't help thinking of the way Regan had always planted her feet and hauled at the handle, like a sailor pulling in a net. He took the last steps up to the door in two long strides and reached past Gina to open the door for her — gave a polite smile when she thanked him, and hurried on to his chambers hearing.

Louise Jamoski, down on the seventh floor, played basketball three times a week and had the height and reach for it. She wasn't afraid of taking a knock on the court or in the court, and for a while McCoy toyed with the idea of inviting her to dinner to talk about one of her cases. He went so far as to drop by her office with the preprepared excuse of an appeals issue. Louise was sitting at a desk so crowded with knickknacks and framed photographs there was barely room for her legal pad. McCoy wondered if she could even fit the contents of her desk into a single suitcase, let alone her whole life. He asked her to look over the case file in his hand, and went back to his own office.

He didn't call any of the numbers he knew, not even Danielle, who was between boyfriends and let him know it.

There was scotch, of course. There was always scotch. The problem with scotch, though, was that when he drank enough to be able to fall asleep, the last thing he heard on the edge of dreams was Regan's voice, soft in the darkness. I'm here. Go to sleep. Her fingers running through his hair.

It left him plenty of time to drop by Abbie's and listen to the amazingly miraculous things baby Ellie Jacqueline Carmichael-Cassidy had done that day. It left him time to accept Serena's dinner invitations more often than once or twice a year, too, and he spent a number of pleasant evenings trading stories from the trenches with Megan Wheeler, the both of them getting gently chided by Serena for their disregard for the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

It left him time to say yes when Jessica Sheets called and suggested a long weekend at a fishing lodge upstate. Neither of them could fish worth a damn, but three days of companionable mostly-silence watching the ripples of water on the surface of the lake was worth the drive, as were three evenings trading war stories as the level of scotch in the bottle got lower.

It also left him plenty of time for work. He and Connie Rubirosa topped the tenth floor league, outright crushing his own previous record for convictions. When even work didn't fill all the evenings and the early mornings and the Saturday afternoons, McCoy started making idle notes on some patterns he'd noticed in recent judicial decisions. The notes grew longer and turned into an article. The Harvard Law Review accepted it. Columbia took the next. New York University invited him to give a guest lecture. It wasn't the first time they'd asked but it was the first time he'd said yes. The papers wrote it up.

If he'd thought about it, McCoy would have seen it coming, but in fact it took him completely by surprise when Arthur Branch resigned and named McCoy as his interim replacement. The other contenders had made powerful enemies. So had McCoy, of course, but his accidental public profile and his conviction record made him an acceptable compromise candidate.

Being District Attorney filled a lot more of his evenings.

He moved the bottle of scotch to the bottom drawer of what he still thought of as Adam's desk, even though there was a whole row of decanters on the liquor cabinet across the room.

He moved the envelope of photographs and the bundle of postcards there, too.