Part 1

My name is Detective Mark Henderson, and in my twenty years with the New York State Police, I’ve learned that the Hudson River doesn’t forgive mistakes. But sometimes, the river is just a weapon used by something—or someone—much colder than the water.

It was Sunday, April 19, 2015. The time was approximately 7:40 PM. The sun was setting over the Hudson Valley, casting long, bruised shadows across the water. The air was deceptively warm for April, but the river? The river was a beast. It was running at about 46°F—cold enough to shut down your muscles in minutes.

The call came into the 911 dispatch in Orange County like a jagged knife through the quiet evening.

“I’m in the Hudson River by the Cornwall Yacht Club,” a woman’s voice cracked over the line, the sound of howling wind and crashing waves nearly drowning her out. “My fiancé fell in the water. Can you please call anybody?”

She identified herself as Angelica. She was frantic, explaining that she and her fiancé, Vincent, had been kayaking back from Bannerman’s Island—a desolate, eerie place about 50 miles north of New York City, known for its abandoned military surplus warehouse ruins. It’s a beautiful spot, but dangerous if you don’t respect the current.

“I can’t get to him!” Angelica screamed into the phone. “It’s very windy and the waves are coming in… He’s going to drown. Please call somebody!”

As a first responder, you learn to listen to the pitch of panic. She said Vincent wasn’t wearing a life jacket. He was clinging to a cushion. She was watching him drift away, pulled south by the brutal current while she was pushed north.

Then, the line went dead.

A rescue boat from the Cornwall Yacht Club tore out of the slip, fighting 3-to-4-foot swells. The wind was whipping up a storm. When they found Angelica, she was floating in her life jacket, her red kayak overturned nearby. She was safe.

But the river was empty. Vincent was gone.

We rushed Angelica to the hospital to treat her for hypothermia. She was shivering, in shock—or so it seemed. As she warmed up, she told us the story. They were a couple in love, living in Poughkeepsie. They loved the outdoors. They had decided to take advantage of the warm air for a photo shoot on the island. But on the way back, the weather turned. Vincent’s kayak flooded, flipped, and he went under.

It sounded like a tragedy. A terrible, heartbreaking accident caused by nature and a lack of safety gear.

But as the days turned into a search and recovery mission, the silence of the river began to whisper something else. We didn’t find a body immediately. What we found were questions.

Vincent was a big guy, 46 years old, full of life. He was a project manager for the state, a guy who loved karaoke and beer. He was a strong swimmer. Why did his kayak sink so fast? Why was he out there without a vest when she had one?

Then, we recovered the blue kayak.

When we pulled Vincent’s boat from the water, my partner, Detective Donaldson, noticed something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

The drain plug.

It’s a small screw-in cap on the top of the kayak, used to drain water on dry land. It was missing. Just a nickel-sized hole, but in rough water? That hole is a slow death sentence.

We brought Angelica in for questioning. We treated her as a victim—at first. But her behavior… it didn’t sit right. Grief looks different on everyone, I know that. But Angelica? She wasn’t just calm; she was practically relieved.

While Vincent was still missing, presumed drowned in that freezing darkness, Angelica was posting selfies. She was doing cartwheels on the grass. She went to a karaoke bar and sang “Hotel California.”

We sat her down in the interrogation room. It was a small, grey room, the kind that sucks the air out of your lungs. I watched her closely. She sat there, smoking a cigarette, looking almost bored.

“Angelica,” I asked, keeping my voice soft, “something isn’t adding up about the kayak.”

She looked at me, her eyes flat.

“You know about the plug, right?” she asked.

I froze. I hadn’t mentioned the plug yet.

“Vincent didn’t have the plug in his kayak,” she continued.

“Did you take the plug out?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I did.”

The room went silent. The hum of the ventilation system sounded like a roar.

“Did you want him dead?” I pressed, leaning in.

She took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “I wanted to be free,” she whispered. “I wanted him gone.”

She described watching him struggle in the freezing water. She called it “euphoric.” She said part of her wanted to save him, but a darker part—a “demon” side—told her to let him go. She admitted she had tampered with his paddle too, removing a safety ring so it would be unstable.

This wasn’t an accident anymore. We were looking at a cold-blooded sabotage. A m*rder on the water.

But was it really a confession? Or was it the rambling of a woman broken by guilt and exhaustion? Because as the investigation dug deeper into their life—the life insurance policies, the strange diary entries, the rocky relationship—the line between a tragic accident and a calculated k*lling began to blur in the most terrifying way.

And Vincent? The river was still holding onto him, hiding the final piece of the puzzle.

Part 2

The Interrogation Room

The days following Vincent Viafore’s disappearance were a blur of grey water and grey skies. The Hudson River is a massive, living entity, and when it takes something, it doesn’t like to give it back. We had boats in the water, sonar scanning the depths, and helicopters chopping the air above Bannerman’s Island. But down at the station, the real storm was brewing in a windowless room with cinderblock walls.

We had recovered the kayaks. That was the first domino to fall.

When the marine unit hauled Vincent’s blue kayak out of the silt and sludge, it looked innocent enough. Just a piece of plastic. But my partner, Detective Donaldson, spotted it immediately. The drain plug was missing. Now, for those who don’t kayak, a drain plug is a small screw-in cap located on the top of the stern. You take it out on land to drain water if you’ve flipped the boat. You never take it out on the water.

And you certainly don’t lose it. It’s threaded. It doesn’t just pop off.

We brought Angelica in. We didn’t slap cuffs on her right away. We needed to understand the landscape of her mind. Was this a grieving fiancée in shock, or was this something darker? We invited her to the barracks, ostensibly to help us with the timeline, to “help us find Vinnie.”

She walked in wearing casual clothes, looking less like a widow-to-be and more like someone stopping by the DMV. She was calm. Too calm.

We sat her down. The interview began at the State Police barracks. It would go on for nearly eleven hours.

“Angelica,” I said, leaning back in the metal chair, trying to look like a friend rather than an inquisitor. “We need to go over the sequence of events again. Just to make sure we didn’t miss anything that could help the dive team.”

She nodded. She spoke with that slight accent, soft and melodic. She told the story again: the cold water, the waves, the wind. But this time, we steered the boat.

“The kayak, Angelica,” I said gently. “We found it. But there’s a part missing.”

She didn’t flinch. She took a drag of her cigarette—we let her smoke, anything to keep her talking—and exhaled a thin plume of blue smoke.

“You mean the plug?” she asked.

The air in the room seemed to vanish. I hadn’t mentioned the plug. Donaldson hadn’t mentioned the plug.

“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice steady, though my pulse was hammering in my neck. “The drain plug. Do you know where it is?”

“Vincent didn’t have it in,” she said, tapping ash into a Styrofoam cup. “I took it out.”

I exchanged a glance with Donaldson. “You took it out? When?”

“A long time ago,” she said. “Maybe the winter. My cat likes to play with it.”

“Okay,” I said, shifting tactics. “But did Vinnie know it was missing when you went out onto the river? Into rough water?”

“He knew,” she claimed.

It didn’t make sense. Vincent was an experienced guy. He loved that river. He knew the dangers. Would he really go out into 46-degree water, with a storm forecast, in a kayak with a hole in it?

The Shift

As the hours ticked by, the atmosphere in the room changed. We moved from fact-finding to “therapy.” It’s a technique we use. We tell the suspect, “It’s okay, we understand, get it off your chest. It’s good for you.” We lower their defenses. We make them feel like we are the only people in the world who understand them.

Angelica was comfortable. She did yoga poses in the interrogation room during breaks. She asked for pizza. She complained about wanting to go home to feed her cat. It was surreal. A man was dead—her fiancé—and she was worried about cat food and doing a downward dog stretch.

I pushed deeper into their relationship.

“Vinnie was a good guy, right?” I asked.

Her expression darkened. “He pushed me,” she said. “He wanted things… s*xual things. Threesomes. Rough stuff. I didn’t like it. He threatened to call off the wedding if I didn’t do what he wanted.”

“That sounds hard,” I sympathized. “Did you feel trapped?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I wanted to be free.”

That word hung in the air. Free.

“Angelica,” I leaned in close, my elbows on the table. “When you saw him in the water… when his kayak flipped… how did you feel?”

She looked me dead in the eye. “I felt euphoric.”

Euphoric. Not terrified. Not heartbroken. Euphoric.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I knew he was going to be gone,” she said. “I knew I would finally be free.”

I pressed her on the mechanics of the accident. The paddle. We had found Vincent’s paddle. It was a two-piece paddle that snaps together. But the locking ring was missing, making the paddle wobbly and useless in heavy chop.

“The paddle, Angelica,” I said. “Did you touch the paddle?”

“I took the ring off,” she said, almost casually.

“Why?”

“So he couldn’t come back,” she mumbled.

It was a chaotic, winding confession. She wasn’t saying, “I plotted to m*rder him at 4:00 PM.” She was describing a passive-aggressive sabotage. She removed the plug. She tampered with the paddle. And when he fell in, she didn’t help him. She watched.

“I wanted him dead,” she finally said, her voice flat. “And now he’s gone, and I’m okay with it.”

The Arrest

We stopped the interview. We had enough. We had an admission of tampering with the vessel. We had a motive—freedom from a controlling relationship. And we had the chilling admission of “euphoria” at his death.

We charged Angelica Graswald with Second-Degree M*rder.

When we walked her out, the media was already sniffing around, but they didn’t know the half of it. To the outside world, this was still a tragic accident. But inside the station, we felt we were looking at a “Black Widow.”

But the investigation was far from over. In fact, charging her was just the beginning of the nightmare. Because as soon as the sun rose, the doubts began to creep in.

The Diary and the Money

While Angelica sat in a cell, unable to make the $3 million bail, we tore her life apart. We executed search warrants on the apartment she shared with Vincent. It was a typical bachelor pad that had been somewhat domesticated by a woman’s touch. But in the drawers, we found the secrets.

First, the money.

Vincent wasn’t rich. In fact, he was broke. He had filed for bankruptcy a few years prior. But he had life insurance. Two policies. Total payout: $550,000. And the primary beneficiary? Angelica Graswald.

We found out she had been asking about the payout almost immediately after he went missing. Before his body was even found, she was calculating her future.

Then, the diary.

Angelica kept a journal. It was written in a mix of English and Latvian. We had it translated. It was a window into a deteriorating mind. She wrote about her hatred for Vincent’s demands. She wrote about wishing he was dead.

“He is disgusting,” one entry read. “I just want him to leave me alone. I wish he would die.”

It was damning. It showed premeditation. It showed a simmering rage that had been boiling under the surface of their smiling Facebook photos.

The Community Reacts

Poughkeepsie is a tight-knit place. Vincent was a local legend—the life of the party, the guy who bought rounds for everyone, the guy with the infectious laugh. When the news broke that Angelica had been arrested for his m*rder, the community split, but mostly they turned on her.

“I knew it,” one of Vinnie’s friends told me. “She was weird. She never cried. At the memorial, she was singing rock songs. Who does that?”

But there were others. Friends of Angelica who said, “No, she’s gentle. She’s a photographer. She loves nature. She loved Vinnie. You guys are twisting her words.”

We interviewed an ex-boyfriend of hers. He painted a different picture. “She has a temper,” he warned us. “She can be vindictive. If she feels cornered, she lashes out.”

The Science of the Sink

But a confession and a diary aren’t enough to convict in a case like this. We needed physics. We needed to prove that what she said she did actually caused his death.

We took a similar kayak out to the river. We pulled the plug. We put it in the water.

And this is where my stomach started to knot.

The kayak didn’t sink.

With the plug out, a little water came in. Maybe an inch. But it didn’t flood the boat. Kayaks are designed with buoyancy. The hole was on top. Unless the boat was already underwater, the hole shouldn’t have mattered much.

“Detective,” one of the marine experts told me, scratching his head. “The water coming over the side from the waves—the ‘swamping’—that would sink him way faster than this little hole.”

I thought about her confession. “I took the plug out. I wanted him dead.”

If she took the plug out thinking it would kill him, that’s attempted m*rder. But if the plug didn’t actually cause the kayak to sink… if the storm caused it… then did she actually kill him? Or did she just set the stage for an accident she hoped would happen?

It was a legal grey area the size of the Hudson River.

The Defense Lawyer

Enter Richard Portale. He was Angelica’s defense attorney, and he was sharp. He wasn’t going to let us walk over his client.

“You guys browbeat a woman who doesn’t speak English as her first language for eleven hours,” Portale told the press on the courthouse steps. “You manipulated her. She didn’t say she killed him. She said she felt guilty that he died. There is a difference.”

Portale was attacking our “therapy” method. He claimed Angelica thought she was just venting, that she was naive, that she came from a country where you trust the police implicitly. He said when she agreed with us, she was just trying to please the authority figures so she could go home and feed her cat.

“She’s not a m*rderer,” Portale said. “She’s an oddball. Being weird isn’t a crime.”

The Weight of the Badge

I went home that night and poured myself a drink. I looked at the file on my kitchen table. The photo of Vincent, smiling, holding a beer. The photo of Angelica, looking lost.

Did we have a cold-blooded killer? Yes, she tampered with the boat. Yes, she delayed calling 911—or so we suspected. Yes, she pulled the paddle away—by her own admission.

But the river… the river is chaotic. Vincent was drunk—his BAC would later prove it. He wasn’t wearing a vest. The water was 46 degrees.

In my gut, I knew she let him die. I knew she wanted it to happen. But proving beyond a reasonable doubt that she made it happen? That was going to be the fight of our lives.

And we were still missing the most important piece of evidence.

We were missing Vinnie.

Part 3

The River Gives Him Back

For over a month, the Hudson kept its secret. The search had turned from a rescue mission to a recovery mission, and the strain was wearing on everyone. Vincent’s mother, Maryanne, called the station almost every day. “Please,” she would sob. “Just bring my boy home.”

It’s the hardest part of the job—telling a mother that you’re looking, but the water is dark and deep.

Then, on Saturday, May 23, 2015—thirty-four days after he vanished—the river finally relented.

A recreational boater near West Point saw something bobbing in the grey water. It was about a mile south of Bannerman’s Island. He thought it was debris at first. When he got closer, he realized it was a man.

We got the call. I went down to the dock. I’ve seen plenty of “floaters” in my career. The water does terrible things to the human body. Decomposition, bloating, the wildlife. But when they pulled him onto the deck of the police launch, there was no mistaking him. It was Vincent. He was still wearing his kayaking gear.

Seeing him changed everything. It wasn’t a missing persons case anymore. It was a body. A corpse. Evidence.

The Autopsy and the Bombshell

We sent the body to the Orange County Medical Examiner. We needed answers. Was there trauma? Did she hit him with the paddle? Was he strangled? Or was it simple drowning?

The autopsy results came back a few days later, and they dropped like a bomb in the middle of the investigation.

Cause of death: Drowning. Contributing factors: Hypothermia, Alcohol Intoxication (his BAC was .06—not drunk, but buzzed).

But then came the Manner of Death.

Usually, in a case like this, the M.E. writes “Accident.” Maybe “Undetermined.”

This time, the M.E. wrote one word: Homicide.

The report stated that the death was caused by “kayak drain plug intentionally removed by another.”

This was a massive win for the prosecution. The medical examiner was validating our theory. They were saying, medically, that the missing plug killed him.

But Richard Portale, the defense attorney, went ballistic.

“This is junk science!” he shouted on the local news. “The Medical Examiner is basing this ruling on the police theory, not on medical evidence. You can’t see ‘intent’ under a microscope! A missing plug didn’t fill his lungs with water. The waves did!”

The Battle of the Experts

The media circus arrived in full force. The “Kayak Killer” headlines were everywhere. New York Post, Daily News, CNN. Everyone wanted a piece of the “Black Widow of the Hudson.”

Angelica was painted as a foreign temptress who lured an American boy to his death for insurance money. But Portale was fighting back in the court of public opinion, and he was doing a good job.

He hired experts. He invited TV crews to the river.

ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 48 Hours both ran specials. They did their own tests. They put a replica of Vincent’s kayak in the water, removed the plug, and waited.

And nothing happened.

I watched the footage on TV in the squad room. The kayak floated. A little water sloshed in, sure, but not enough to sink it. Even with a guy sitting in it, it stayed afloat.

Then they tested the paddle without the locking ring. The expert paddled around just fine. “It’s a little loose,” the guy said, “but it works.”

The public narrative started to shift. People started asking: Did she really kill him? Or did she just confess to a fantasy?

The experts for the defense argued that Vincent died because of the “Cold Shock Response.” He hit that 46-degree water without a wet suit. He gasped—an involuntary reflex. He inhaled water. He panicked. His muscles locked up. He drowned. It happens to swimmers all the time.

“If the plug didn’t sink the boat,” Portale argued in pre-trial hearings, “then her removing it—even if she wanted him to die—didn’t cause his death. You can’t m*rder someone with voodoo. You need a murder weapon. And a hole that doesn’t sink a boat is not a weapon.”

The Demon in the Room

While the science was being debated, I couldn’t shake the memory of the interrogation room. The science might say the plug didn’t matter. But her words mattered.

“I felt euphoric.” “I wanted him gone.” “I delayed calling 911.”

We analyzed the timeline of the 911 call. Based on the cell tower data and her story, there was a gap. A gap of maybe ten, fifteen minutes between when he went into the water and when she dialed.

Ten minutes in freezing water is eternity.

If she sat there and watched him struggle… if she pulled her paddle away when he reached for it… that’s m*rder. That’s Depraved Indifference.

But proving that “gap” was hard. It was her word against a dead man. She claimed she was disoriented, that she was trying to reach him.

The Trial Looms

It was 2017. Two years had passed since Vincent died. Angelica had been sitting in jail the whole time. The trial was approaching.

The District Attorney was nervous. I could feel it.

“Mark,” the DA told me during a prep meeting. “This is risky. We have a confession that the defense is tearing apart. We have a ‘murder weapon’—the plug—that the experts say didn’t work. We have no eyewitnesses. We have a sympathetic defendant—a young woman, crying in court.”

“She’s a sociopath,” I argued. “You heard the tapes. She laughed about it.”

“The jury might not see a sociopath,” the DA countered. “They might see a confused immigrant woman bullied by the police. If we go to trial and lose, she walks free. Zero consequences. Can we risk that?”

That’s the nightmare scenario for any cop. You know they did it. You know they are dangerous. But the system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And we had plenty of doubt floating in that river.

The “False Confession” Theory

The defense brought in a heavyweight expert on false confessions. They were going to testify that Angelica’s personality type—compliant, eager to please, slightly naive—made her the perfect candidate to be manipulated.

They pointed out that we fed her the information.

“You know about the plug, right?” — I asked her that. “Did you take it out?” — I suggested that.

They were going to say we planted the memories in her head. That after 11 hours of stress, she would have admitted to killing JFK if we asked her to.

It was infuriating. I knew what I saw in her eyes. It wasn’t fear. It was coldness. But I also knew how it would look to a jury.

The Surprise Turn

Weeks before jury selection was set to begin, the phone rang. It was the DA.

“We’re discussing a deal,” he said.

“A deal?” I stood up at my desk. “For m*rder?”

“Not for m*rder,” he said. “Criminally Negligent Homicide.”

My heart sank. That’s a low-level felony. It means you were careless. It means you made a mistake that cost a life. It’s not m*rder. It’s not even Manslaughter.

“She admits guilt,” the DA explained. “She waives her right to appeal. She goes to prison, but not for life.”

“She watched him die!” I yelled. “She took the plug out!”

“And if the jury believes the plug didn’t sink the boat?” the DA shot back. “Then she walks. Mark, look at the family. Maryanne can’t take a trial. She can’t watch the photos of her son’s body on a giant screen for weeks. She wants closure.”

I thought of Vincent’s mom. I thought of the sister. They had been through hell. A trial would be a circus. It would drag on for months. And if Angelica was acquitted? It would destroy them.

The Plea

On a rainy Tuesday, we packed into the courtroom. Angelica stood before the judge. She looked thinner, pale from two years in county jail.

She wiped tears from her eyes.

“I admit,” she read from a prepared statement, her voice trembling, “that I failed to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk… that removing the plug and the ring… caused Vincent’s death.”

She admitted she knew he wasn’t wearing a vest. She admitted she knew the water was dangerous. She admitted she should have stopped him.

She pleaded guilty.

It was over. Legally, at least. But as I watched the bailiff lead her away, I didn’t feel like I had won. I felt like the river had won. It had taken a good man, and in exchange, we got a piece of paper and a plea deal.

We had a conviction. But we didn’t have the whole truth. That was still out there, drifting in the current.

Part 4

The Sentence

The day of the sentencing was cold. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones, reminding you of the water. The courtroom was packed. Vincent’s family sat in the front row, clutching tissues, their faces etched with two years of sleepless nights.

Angelica stood in her orange jumpsuit. The “Lady of the River” looked small.

Judge Robert Freehill didn’t hold back. He wasn’t swayed by the defense’s portrait of a confused, innocent girl. He had read the pre-sentence report. He had seen the diary.

“You could have walked out on Vincent if you were unhappy,” the judge boomed from the bench. “Instead of whatever it was in your mind that led to removing the plug and taking other actions.”

He leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “You certainly have a lack of understanding of other people’s feelings. It was all about you. Your freedom. Your euphoria.”

He sentenced her to the maximum allowed under the plea deal: 1⅓ to 4 years in state prison.

Because she had already served nearly three years in county jail waiting for trial, she would be eligible for parole almost immediately.

A gasp went through the courtroom. Vincent’s mother, Maryanne, stood up to give her victim impact statement. Her voice shook with a rage that only a mother can know.

“Four years for taking someone’s life?” she cried out. “No way. My son was a good man. Everyone loved him. And she… she watched him die.”

She looked directly at Angelica. “I never want to see you again.”

Angelica didn’t look back. When she was given a chance to speak, she maintained her innocence, despite the guilty plea she had just signed.

“I loved Vince very much,” she said, her voice soft, almost childlike. “I don’t believe I was treated fairly. I am not a m*rderer. If I could bring Vince back, I would.”

It was the final insult. A guilty plea to get a shorter sentence, followed by a denial of guilt to save face.

Release

In December 2017, just a few months after the sentencing, the doors of the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility opened. Angelica Graswald walked out.

She had served her time. 32 months. That was the price of Vincent Viafore’s life.

The media was there, of course. Cameras clicking, microphones thrust in her face. She didn’t say much. She got into a car and drove away.

But she didn’t leave the area. That was the strange part. Most people would run. Go back to Latvia. Go to California. Anywhere but the Hudson Valley.

But she stayed.

She gave interviews. She appeared on 20/20 again. She sat in a chair, looking perfectly made up, and told the world, “I’m innocent. I took the plea to avoid a life sentence. God knows the truth.”

She even tried to claim the life insurance money—the $550,000. That was the kicker. The audacity. Vincent’s family had to sue her to stop it. They eventually settled confidentially, but the fact that she tried… it told me everything I needed to know about her “grief.”

The Ghost of Ian Jones

The river wasn’t done teaching us lessons.

While Angelica was sitting in jail, another tragedy happened on the Hudson that mirrored Vincent’s death so closely it gave me chills.

Ian Jones, a young model, and his girlfriend, Tarly Lennox, went kayaking. They were young, beautiful, in love. They went out after a party. No life jackets. Alcohol involved.

Their kayak capsized in the current.

Ian was a strong swimmer. He tried to save Tarly. He pushed her toward a passing boat. But the current took him. He drowned.

It was ruled an accident immediately. No investigation. No interrogation. Tarly posted a heartbreaking tribute on Instagram. “My soulmate… my light.”

Why was that an accident and Vincent’s a homicide?

It came down to intent. Tarly Lennox didn’t have a diary saying she hated Ian. She didn’t admit to tampering with the kayak. She didn’t say she felt “euphoric” when he went under.

The Ian Jones case reminded me why we prosecuted Angelica. Accidents happen. The river kills people. But there is a difference between a tragedy and a setup. Angelica might not have held Vincent’s head underwater, but she set the stage. She pulled the plug. She loosened the paddle. She waited. She let the river do her dirty work.

Epilogue: The Silent River

It’s been years now. I’m retired from the force. But I still drive down to the river sometimes. I look out at Bannerman’s Island, the ruins crumbling slowly into the water.

Angelica is out there somewhere. Free. Just like she wanted. She got her “freedom.” She got her yoga and her photography.

Vincent is in the ground.

Did justice happen?

Legally, yes. She did time. She has a felony record. She will always be the “Kayak Killer.”

But morally? I don’t know.

I think about the “demon” she talked about in that interrogation room. The part of her that watched him struggle and whispered, “Let him go.”

We all have dark thoughts. We all have moments of frustration in relationships. But most of us don’t pull the drain plug. Most of us reach out a hand when someone is drowning.

Angelica kept her hand to herself.

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder what Vinnie was thinking in those final moments. The cold paralyzing his limbs. The water filling his mouth. Seeing his fiancée—the woman he planned to marry—floating nearby in her red kayak, safe and dry, just watching him.

Did he know? Did he realize, as the darkness took him, that this wasn’t an accident?

The Hudson keeps its secrets. It swallows the evidence and washes away the truth. But every time I see a blue kayak on the water, I feel a chill that has nothing to do with the wind.

Be careful who you paddle with. And for God’s sake, wear a life jacket. Because once you’re in the water, you’re on your own.