There was so much to unpack in that sentence. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Keme not only could talk, but that he did talk—apparently, at length—to just about everyone except me. The fact that he slept rough when he wasn’t sleeping in the coach house was news to me; one of the first things I’d learned about Keme was that he had a bad home life, but maybe that had been assuming too much. I was starting to think Keme didn’t have a home.

  “I might say something, actually,” I said. “I have the slight advantage that he won’t actually scream at me, since he doesn’t talk to me in general. And I’d like him to graduate high school, preferably so he can go to college somewhere far, far away from here.”

  “Good luck,” Indira said.

  “He might get angry, sure. But someone needs to tell him.”

  “Better you than me.”

  “I mean, we’re friends. What’s he going to do? Beat me up? Silently?”

  Indira patted my hand. Somehow, that made it so much worse.

  “Maybe Deputy Bobby can tell him,” I said. “Maybe he can say it, and then he can get in his car and drive away. Although then Keme might run after him and hang onto the car, Terminator style. Of course, that won’t work because Deputy Bobby probably won’t ever talk to me again.”

  Indira patted my hand again.

  So, of course, I told her what I’d left out before: the fight with Deputy Bobby.

  “And he was just such a—such a man about it,” I said when I finished. “It makes me want to scream.”

  Indira looked like she was trying not to smile.

  “I know,” I said sourly. “I’m aware of the irony.”

  “I’m sure you are, dear.”

  “It was totally out of line. And inappropriate. And probably illegal. And he has no right to be snooping into my personal life, or trying to control what I do, or judging me for who I want to date.”

  “Do you want to date this Damian fellow?”

  “I don’t know. No, probably not. He seems like he’d want to get high and listen to Jack Johnson and go to parties all the time. It would be horrible.”

  Indira made a small, polite noise that might have meant anything.

  “But you know what? It’s nice to have someone be interested in me and not have that person be a murder suspect, or a murder victim, or—or living in their mom’s basement and trying to convince me that ‘online gamer’ is a real job.”

  “And he looked like quite the stone fox.”

  I blinked.

  “Millie sent me a picture,” Indira said.

  “What kind of life am I living? How did I end up in this micro-dystopia? Don’t answer that.”

  “Are you going to text him? He might not be boyfriend material, but sometimes, Dash, I think you’re lonely. And it can be nice to feel appreciated.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it is kind of—it was for sexual assault, you know? The arrest. Maybe that’s not fair to him, but it does kind of worry me.”

  Indira made that same small noise again.

  “Oh no,” I said. “No way. Deputy Bobby was still way out of line.”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  I stared at her. There was nothing I could read on her face. “Why couldn’t he have, you know, pretended to ask for permission first? Or he could have lied. He could have told me it came up when they were investigating Gerry’s death.”

  “Because Bobby isn’t a liar.”

  In the distance, waves broke against the sea cliffs.

  “He knew what he was doing,” I finally said. “And he knew it was wrong.”

  With a nod, Indira sat forward and said, “That should tell you something about Bobby. Let me ask you a question: would you be this angry if it had been someone else?”

  “What?”

  “If someone else had brought you this information. If Millie had known Damian’s reputation because, as usual, Millie knew everything about this town. Or if Fox had figured it out—probably from rewatching another season of Law & Order. Or if I’d recognized him from somewhere else. Or if Keme had known because all the surfers talked about him.”

  It took me too long to say, “But it wasn’t any of those things. And Deputy Bobby didn’t just know. He had to go looking for it. Because he thinks I can’t take care of myself. Because he thinks I’ve got terrible judgment in men. Because he thinks I need—I need to be fixed or taken care of or something. And I don’t need that. I certainly don’t need that from him, not when he can’t even handle his own—”

  I managed to stop myself. A flush made me pull at my jacket, and sweat prickled under my arms.

  “Do you really believe Bobby thinks those things about you?” Indira asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I won’t pretend I know what he thinks,” Indira said, “or that I know everything that’s been said between you two. It’s possible he’s told you something, or expressed in some way I haven’t seen, that he thinks those things. But from what I have seen, I can tell you that you are one of the most important people in Bobby’s life.”

  “That’s ridiculous—”

  “Dashiell.” The vexation in Indira’s voice, more than the use of my full name, cut through my hazy thoughts. She continued, “He comes over almost every day. Before his shifts start. Or after. On the weekends, you go on walks together—”

  “Hikes,” I said.

  “They’re only hikes if you actually go uphill,” she said with unnecessary, um, factitude. “You go out to eat together. Good Lord, last week, you dragged that poor young man to the outlet mall with you. How many times have I walked in on you reading a book, and Bobby’s lying on the floor listening to music, or you’re watching a show together, or he’s being admirably patient while you and Keme play those ridiculous games.”

  Yes, I thought. Okay. True. “But he’s only over here when West is working, and West doesn’t like going hiking, and he needed new earbuds and they have a store at the outlet mall—” I stopped, my throat thick. “I mean, I’ve only known him for a few months.”

  But that didn’t sound true, not when I said it out loud. Because it felt like I’d known Deputy Bobby for a long time. It felt like I’d known him forever. I texted him every day. Heck, as Indira had so ungraciously pointed out, I saw him almost every day. Everything about our friendship had happened so easily, so organically, that I’d never really stopped to think about it.

  “He has friends,” I said, my voice a little too tight to sound natural. “He has West.”

  “You should know better than anyone,” Indira said, “that it’s possible to have a life full of people and still be desperately lonely.”

  I couldn’t look at her, so I looked at the table. Everything blurred and doubled in my vision.

  When Indira spoke again, her voice was full of unexpected compassion. “I think that when you said those things to Bobby, you might not have said them because you believe he thinks them. I think, maybe, that Bobby touched a nerve without meaning to.” She was silent for a long time. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I nodded. “If he was—” So many words presented themselves to me. I chose the only safe one. “—worried about me, why didn’t he just tell me?”

  The vexation was back in her voice as she said, “I believe you were complaining earlier about someone acting like a man.” She rose. “You might consider that he was trying to tell you, Dash, the only way he knew how. You might consider that this is hard for him, and he’s doing his best.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Because I didn’t know what to say. Because I didn’t want to think too much about what Indira was saying. About what she might be saying. Because it was all conjecture, assumptions, based on wildly inaccurate interpretations of, well, everything.

  But when I looked up, Indira was staring back at me: those dark, knowing eyes, and that witch’s shock of white hair.

  A knock came at the door. It had an unfamiliar cadence—labored, almost struggling. But it was strange how you could know a person. All the ways you could know them. The way they looked when they were trying not to laugh at you. (Because, for example, you’d fallen off your bike trying to do a trick you remembered from fifth grade.) The way a room felt when they were in it—how you could know, without even looking, that they were lying on the floor, earbuds in, listening to some band you’d never heard of. Their breathing, maybe. That hint of a clean, masculine smell. Heck, maybe it was their body’s electromagnetic field. The way they knocked on the door, and no matter where you were in the house, that sound sent something through you: like someone had plucked a string, and a single, perfect note ran through your body.

  “I wonder,” Indira said, and her smile was kind because she was always kind, “who that could be?”

  Chapter 8

  The porch light rendered a chiaroscuro Deputy Bobby: the light gleaming on his hair, his eyes, along his jaw, where a hint of very un-Deputy Bobby stubble showed. The rest of him was shadows, just a suggestion of the hollow of his throat, slumped shoulders, the outline of those strong arms. His mouth did something strange, and I realized he was trying to smile.

  My conversation with Indira flooded back to me: what she’d said about him; what she’d said about me. My mind went blank, and all I could come up with was “Oh. Hi.”

  “Hi.” It seemed like maybe that was all he could come up with as well, but then, the words labored, he managed, “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. God, are you okay?”

  His nod was a ghosting movement in the dark. He wasn’t standing all that close, but his presence—his silence—was unbearably intimate. I thought this was the Deputy Bobby that maybe nobody else was allowed to see. And I thought, again, about what Indira said. About what it might mean.

  Assumptions, I told myself. Interpretations. The reality—cold, hard reality like a sober morning—rushed through me. We were friends. That was all. We’d always be friends.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” I said.

  He stood there. Behind him, the brittle outlines of hemlocks stirred in the breeze.

  “About how I reacted. When you told me. Uh, that stuff about Damian. And yes, I promise I can speak in full sentences, it’s just, uh—” I tapped the side of my head. “—a little choppy in here right now.”

  His breathing was uneven. Like he’d been running, a part of my brain thought. Like he’d run all the way here.

  “I know you did it because you want me to be safe,” I said. “I know you did it because you’re my friend. And I appreciate it, I do. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I might be kind of sensitive about dating and relationships and my generally bad judgment in men, but I shouldn’t have projected that onto you.”

  “You don’t have to be okay,” he said.

  “No, I overreacted.”

  “You can get angry. You can—you can yell.”

  There was something so strange about his voice, like he wasn’t really talking to me, that my reply came out cautiously: “I don’t want to yell at you.”

  “I’m just saying, if you’re not okay, that’s okay.”

  “It’s okay not to be okay?” I wanted it to sound like a joke, but it fell flat.

  Deputy Bobby nodded again, just that suggestion of movement in the darkness. “You can tell me if you’re not okay. You can talk to me about it.”

  “Bobby—” I struggled for a moment, and once again, I came up with a moment of sheer poetic genius: “I’m fine.”

  He did this little breath thing that was so awful I didn’t realize, until an instant too late, it had been a laugh. And then, in that way as though he were talking to someone else, he said, “I just wanted to check on you.”

  “Okay,” I said drawing out the word until it was almost a question. But he didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. “Do you want to come in?”

  He shook his head.

  I want to take full ownership of this moment and acknowledge that I am not a particularly bright man, because it didn’t occur to me until exactly that moment what was happening.

  Then I said, “Bobby, are you okay?”

  He jerked out a nod.

  “Are you sure? Because you don’t seem like you’re okay. And someone very wise and much, much older than me once told me it was okay not to be okay.”

  “I, uh—” The way he stopped broke my heart, but it was worse when he tried to smile again. He sounded like he was setting up a joke when he said, “The guys took me in. I had to call West from the station.”

  “Oh God—”

  “It’s fine. They didn’t arrest me.” The pause that came after had a numb quality. “But West told me not to come home tonight.”

  I waited, but no punchline came. Where the ambient light caught his eyes, his gaze was blank and unprocessing.

  “Oh God,” I said. “Bobby, I’m so sorry.”

  “He’s really mad.”

  “It’s going to be okay. Come inside.”

  He didn’t move, so I took his arm and brought him into the vestibule. I hadn’t bothered with the lights, so we stood together in the shadows. A part of me was aware that I was still holding his arm: solid, dense with muscle. A part of me was aware of the heat of him. And a part of me was aware that he was trembling.

  Deputy Bobby put his free hand to his forehead and held it there like he had a headache. “He’s so mad.”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby.”

  He shook his head, barely more than an impression in the gloom.

  “He’ll get over it,” I said. “It’ll all work out.”

  “He’s right to be angry. He should be angry.” The only reason I knew he closed his eyes was because that hint of reflected light was extinguished. Despair tilted his voice as he said, “Oh my God.”

  I should have known better. After that conversation with Indira, I definitely should have known better. But it didn’t matter; he was in pain, and he was my friend, and his heartbreak was so intense it felt radioactive. I slipped my arms around him and pulled him against me.

  His body was stiff at first, his muscles tense, joints locked into stiff angles. I always forgot I was taller, and it was disorienting how he fit with me, his head resting on my shoulder, his face turned into my neck. His breath was hot on the sensitive skin there. With every breath, I could smell his hair.

  The thing you don’t learn writing mystery novels? Romance. When Will Gower was a rough-and-ready private eye, he had sex—lots of sex. (Too much sex, if you asked Phil, my parents’ agent.) And when he was a jaded cop with a drinking problem, he had sex. And when he was an icily intellectual FBI profiler, he had sex (in one manuscript that will never see the light of day, with the serial killer he was trying to profile). Will Gower got his heart broken by the systemic cruelties of a corrupt world. Will Gower, the white knight who never knew when to give up, lost people he cared about. But he didn’t fall in love. And the part of my brain that never turned off, the part of my brain that turned everything into stories, the part of me that recorded details and saved them for the next time I needed them, thought: the way I’m holding him, his shirt is slightly rucked up, and I can feel a hint of bare skin low on his back; the way his hair tickles my nose and I want to sneeze; how he splays his fingers against my ribs, like he’s not sure if he’s pushing me away or grabbing on. My heart, I thought, like I’d come apart from my body. How fast my heart is beating. And I wanted to turn it into a story, to make it safe and manageable, sewn up from beginning to end. But I didn’t know how, and even if I had, I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to do it. To take this, all of it, and make it...less.

  By degrees, his body softened until he felt real again. And my heart slowed down. A little. Like, there wasn’t an imminent risk of a cardiac event. He stirred. His fingers flexed against my side and drew back. I relaxed my arms, and he retreated a step. He tried to look at me, but his eyes were fixed on something behind me, and he rubbed his jaw.

  “Let’s get you something to eat.”

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s sit down, then.”

  He swallowed, and it looked painful. “I should go.”

  “Bobby,” I said.

  And now he did look at me. I didn’t know exactly what to call what I saw in his face. A plea, maybe. Asking me for—what?

  I changed what I’d been about to say. “Where are you going to spend the night?”

  “I don’t know. The Rock On.”

  The Rock On Inn was adorable, but I said, “No way. Cheri-Ann will put it on Facebook two minutes after you check in.”

  Deputy Bobby rubbed his eyes.

  “You can stay here,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Yes, it’s perfect. There’s a million bedrooms, and they’re all haunted, plus secret passages for easy murdering, and all those taxidermy birds to stare at you while you try to sleep.”

  He stopped rubbing and just pressed his fingers against his eyes. “Dash, I can’t—”

  “You can. It’ll be fine. Do you—I mean, did you have, like, a bag or something?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll grab it,” I said. “Be right back.”

  “No, I can—”

  I squeezed past him and jogged out into the night.

  The air was cool verging on cold, with a snap to it, and after the relative warmth of the house, my glasses fogged. Or maybe that was my breath, because it certainly felt like I was overheated, like I was drawing in lungfuls of the mist as I tried to bring my body temperature down. I wiped my hands on my jeans when I got to his Pilot, and as I opened the door, I thought, What am I doing?

  Before I could consider that question more carefully, I grabbed the backpack from the passenger seat and hurried back inside.

  Deputy Bobby was standing where I’d left him, a silhouette in the murky vestibule.

  “Sure you don’t want anything to eat?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Come on,” I said.

  I had to touch his arm to get him moving, but after that, I was careful to keep my hands to myself. We moved through the house in the dark, heading for the central staircase. I kept to the rugs. I went slowly on the stairs. The sounds of our steps were muffled, but they seemed magnified in the house’s silence. I felt like I’d gone back in time, like I was sixteen and sneaking Justin Anderson into my bedroom to make out. In the thick shadows, every shape became Indira, and a flash fire went through my face. Not because she would think badly of me. Not because she would even care. But because of what she’d said earlier. Because a part of me was still running away from that conversation.