It’s not much of an office. It’s more of a closet, actually, where somebody managed to shoehorn in a desk and a chair and yes, even a filing cabinet. You can see where they ripped out a set of shelves at one point, and the fluorescent panel overhead flickers constantly, which means by the end of the night, I’ll have a headache concentrated behind one eye. It still smells like mop. Like every building on Wroxall College’s campus, it’s got a bizarre layout, apparently because everything here was built before anybody invented a job called architect—I have no idea what the little suite of rooms we were given was originally meant for, but what matters is this weird little space is ours. For now.

  Robin is already on his feet again, leaning against the desk slinkily. I think the point is to let me know I could put his legs behind his ears if I wanted to. If the fall bothers him, he doesn’t give any sign of it. He gives me a little smile and says, “I’ll have to check my schedule.”

  You have to give him credit for trying. And to be fair, if we’d met a year ago…

  “Is there something I can help you with?” I ask as I set the box of phones—yes, phones; real, old-fashioned phones—on the desk. “Or do you want to start doing the work I’m not paying you to do?”

  “What about you?” Robin asks. “Any plans this weekend?”

  “Get out.”

  “Any hot dates?”

  “Out.”

  “You’re so mean to me.”

  “Fuckin’ A.” I pull out the chair and give him a look. “Work, Robin. Now.”

  “It’s because you’re stressed. You never take a break. You need to relax. You need to have some fun.”

  “Interesting idea. I’ll consider it while you’re out there doing some fucking work.”

  It’s finally too much. He glares. He de-slinkifies. All of a sudden, he’s standing with prissy precision, trying to melt me with his eyes, and then he stalks out of the room.

  I should set a timer on my watch. I give him twenty minutes.

  The worst part is, he likes it.

  I pick through the phones, looking for any that are clearly beyond saving. With most of them, I won’t know until I plug them in and try, but I set two aside as visibly beyond repair—one looks like it’s been smashed with a hammer, and the other has chewing gum pressed into the receiver. The box with the survivors goes against the wall, and then I’m back at the desk, checking my laptop, looking at the never-ending to-do list.

  If I could be here more than a few nights. If I had more time than the weekends.

  Furniture for the drop-in room.

  Somewhere to plug in these fucking phones.

  My eye is already starting to throb.

  Fix this fucking fluorescent.

  But all those things require money, and while the college has been generous enough—if that’s the right word—to supply us with space, they’re not handing out any cash, and the small grant I received from the state ran out a long time ago.

  All of which means donors.

  And that’s why, in thirty minutes, I need to be ready.

  I take all of WISP’s paperwork out of the filing cabinet and spread it out on the desk. WISP—Wahredua Intimate / Sexual Partner Violence Initiative (we couldn’t figure out how to make the V work. Or, for that matter, the second I)—is still getting off the ground. That’s putting it politely. The reality is that the nonprofit is kind of blindly humping its way along because: a) I don’t have enough time to do it properly, and b) even if I did, I don’t have the money to really get things going.

  Problems for another time.

  More specifically, problems for about twenty-six minutes from now.

  I spend some time reviewing our organizational plan. I make sure I’ve got my cost projections, my budget estimates, my fundraising goals. I’m not exactly a finance wiz, and there’s this part of me watching from the sidelines, seeing me in this dingy little cupboard with stacks of paper around me, my eye starting to twitch, that can’t help but think, Nerd. And not the sexy kind of nerd, where a hot guy just puts on a pair of glasses. There’s this part of me that is dying at the fact that I’m in this fucking room, for another fucking night, instead of out doing—

  Well, Robin.

  No, I tell myself.

  Absolutely not.

  “Do you want some coffee?” Robin asks.

  It’s only been eighteen minutes.

  “Get out!”

  “You need a massage. If you sit like that, you’re going to hurt your back.”

  I’m not Emery Hazard, so I don’t throw a stapler. But I do put the laptop between me and Robin and stare at the screen until he huffs away.

  When a knock comes at the door, I can’t help it. “No, Robin, I do not want a new pen or a roll of tape or a foot rub or a blow job. I want to get these fucking numbers right before I—”

  It’s not Robin, of course.

  “—talk to Kayla.”

  Kayla is legit. She’s probably ten years older than me, she makes absolutely no effort to hide her grays, and she smokes like she’s afraid someone’s going to grab the pack out of her hand. She also has way raunchier jokes than me, so she just resettles her glasses and says, “If he’s offering.”

  “God, don’t let him hear you.”

  “I heard her,” Robin sings out from the front of the suite.

  “Close the door.” I pitch my voice to carry. “And mind your own fucking business.”

  “Coffee?” I ask as Kayla settles into her seat. “Tea? One of those probiotic sodas that’s supposed to help you shit like a Kardashian?”

  “Do you have any of that?”

  “No, but I’ll tell Robin I want one.”

  She’s not impressed.

  “What?” I ask. “He’s loaded. His dad invented—uh, what’s like Microsoft, but even nerdier?”

  “Gray, we need to talk.”

  “Uh, okay. That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not.” She reaches for her purse, presumably for her smokes, and glances around. “How do you not have any windows in here?”

  “Because this is the room where they used to keep Jiminy fucking Cricket. What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Kayla is what they call a nonprofit development specialist. And for some reason known only to God, she agreed to help me at ridiculously reduced rates, thank God, since by that point, the grant was long gone. Right now, though, she doesn’t look like she’s planning on developing this particular nonprofit. She looks like she’s wondering how much she can smoke before she sets off the sprinkler system.

  “Kayla!”

  “All right!” She takes a deep breath. “I’ve been…talking to people. Some clients. Friends of friends. Potential donors.” She stops. “They’re all very excited about what you’re doing here.”

  “Okay, great.”

  “There’s nothing like this in Wahredua. The college’s support is a big deal. And there’s a lot of goodwill for the people you’re trying to help, which is part of the reason I let you drag me into this in the first place.”

  “You’re saying good things,” I say. “These are good things, right? This is the kind of shit you want to hear before your first major fundraiser.”

  “Everyone wants this program to succeed.”

  And then she stops again.

  I sit back, and the old chair squeaks. “You know who does this?”

  Kayla is looking around like she might have missed a window.

  “Tops do this. It’s so big. You’re going to love it. I don’t want to hurt you. And then all they do is poke around with the tip. Bitch, just stick it in.”

  Kayla doesn’t laugh, but she does look at me, and it’s a look.

  Robin’s breathing a little more heavily on the other side of the door, God help me.

  “You,” Kayla says.

  “What about me?”

  “The problem is you.”

  I shift. The chair squeaks again. “What?”

  “Gray, look. It’s a small town. People have long memories.”

  “Me? I’m the problem?”

  “You’ve had a lot of…ups and downs.”

  “I started this fucking thing. What do you mean, I’m the problem?”

  “Nonprofits are complicated. They’re different. Think of the attention and scrutiny directed toward people in leadership positions in other fields—politics, business, that kind of thing. Sure, people pay lip service to wanting them to have a certain moral caliber, but everyone expects them to act…otherwise. With a nonprofit, though, the leadership is supposed to embody the values of the organization. And when you’re dealing with something extra sensitive—sexual assault, domestic violence, that kind of thing—it goes double. You are the organization. Get it? Donors want to feel like they’re giving their money to an organization—to a person—that they know is above reproach.”

  “It was my fucking idea. I got the fucking grant. I put in all the fucking work. If they’re so fucking worried about it, they can come down here and put in a few fucking hours themselves!”

  Kayla shuts her mouth. Her gaze slides away.

  I take a few deep breaths. “Sorry.”

  Her hand moves through the air, slicing through the words.

  Overhead, the fluorescent buzzes. The smell of mop, somehow, is stronger.

  “So, what?” I ask. “I meet with them. I play nice. You can set that up, right? You said you know people who want to donate to this kind of organization.”

  “I said I know potential donors.” She settles herself. She really wants those smokes. It looks like it takes an effort for her to bring her gaze up. “One of them, in particular, is very interested. Ben Fields. Have you heard of him?”

  I shake my head.

  “He’s…traditional.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “He’s gay, before you get your panties in a wad. But he thinks of himself as a family man. With family values. And that means when he’s considering supporting an organization, he wants to see those same values reflected in the leadership.” Kayla pauses like she’s chambering the last round. “Gray, you’re not what Ben Fields would consider a family man.”

  “Are you fucking kidding—”

  “Let me talk.”

  Somehow, I shut my mouth.

  “It’s not just Ben, although if you could win him over, the rest of them would fall into line. I know—everybody knows—you’ve done a lot of good for this community. Nobody has any questions about that. But this project is new, and you’ve got a demanding full-time job, and anybody who looks at you can tell you’re burning the candle at both ends. And—I’m going to be frank now—you have had some bad times, too. Like I said, people have long memories.”

  I manage to control my volume. “For the last year—”

  “I know.”

  “—I have been a fucking saint.”

  “Gray, I know.”

  “I don’t go to bars. I’m not on the apps. I do my job, and I do this job, and that’s it.” I try to stop there. “There’s this guy who does yoga at the park, and he totally would have sucked me off, and I didn’t even let him!”

  “Not exactly helping your case,” Kayla says. She tries to smile.

  I don’t. I’m trying to breathe.

  “You hired me to help you build up your nonprofit,” Kayla says. “So, that’s what I’m doing. I’m telling you that you’ve started something great here. A lot of people are excited about it. They care about it. They want to see it succeed. But they also want someone, for lack of a better word, trustworthy at the helm.”

  “Trustworthy?”

  “Responsible. Solid. Reliable.”

  “Boring.”

  “Come on, Gray.”

  “Get Emery fucking Hazard then.”

  “I’m telling you that you have a choice.” Kayla gets to her feet. “You can either do what’s good for WISP, or you can do what’s good for your ego.” She clutches her purse in both hands. Tonight, a distant part of my brain notes, will probably be a two-packer for Kayla. “I’m sorry.”

  3

  Sam

  Chief Somerset and Mr. Hazard live in a nice neighborhood of older homes near the high school. It’s the kind of place anybody would like to grow up in. The houses look like real, old houses. I know that sounds dumb, but that’s the only way I can say it. Not cookie-cutter stuff, I mean. The sidewalks are cracked and uneven, and the streets have big tar patches. Everybody keeps their lawns clean, and it’s a good mix of young families and older couples. A real community, which you don’t see all that much anymore.

  That’s where I go Friday after my shift ends.

  Chief Somerset—Mr. Somerset—is my mentor. We usually meet twice a month, but this is an emergency. He’ll understand.

  Mr. Hazard, I’m not so sure.

  I park on the street. Colt’s truck is in the driveway—he’s their son. Evie, their daughter, left her bike by the curb, so I wheel it up to the porch. The sound of a lawnmower floats over everything, the day sweet with spring. They’ve got tulips all along the porch’s skirting, and even though they haven’t done much work on the flower beds yet, it all looks real nice. Like a family lives here, I guess.

  When I knock on the door, Colt answers. He’s about to turn eighteen, and he finally gave up on having long hair, thank God. He’s a nice-looking kid. He looks a lot like Mr. Hazard, actually, even though they’re not biologically related. But when he had his hair long, he looked like one of those sheep that somebody forgot to shear.

  “Hi, Sam,” Colt says. “Come on in; I’ll get J-H.”

  He jogs toward the back of the house without waiting for an answer, so I step inside and shut the door. From the back of the house comes the sound of another door opening, and then Colt screaming, “J-H! J-H!” And then, like a kid who thinks he’s an adult, “John-Henry Somerset!”

  The lawnmower cuts off, and Mr. Somerset calls something back, but I can’t make out the words.

  “You can come back here,” Colt shouts, and then he thumps down the steps toward the basement.

  I make my way to the kitchen as Mr. Somerset comes inside. He’s wearing an old Wahredua Wildcats T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, mesh shorts, and an old pair of sneakers stained from cutting the grass. His hair is blond and always a little messy. I guess it’s not really a secret that I think it looks good; that’s why I changed how I wear my hair. One time, a lady who was visiting saw him in St. Taffy’s and sat in his lap and said she wanted to feed him grapes, and the guys at the station still talk about that. The way I think about it is that he’s all the guys you wanted to be in high school. Right now, he’s kicking one foot, trying to shake off little shreds of grass that are clinging to his leg. He smells like hot skin and gasoline and fresh-cut grass, and when he looks up, he smiles.

  “Hey, Sam. How’s it going?”

  “Pretty good, sir.”

  He takes another look at me, and his eyes crinkle. I think that’s when he’s trying not to smile. “You sure about that?”

  I shrug. “I guess not so good.”

  “Have a seat. You want something to drink?”

  “No, sir. Thanks, though.”

  He gets himself a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and leans against the counter. “How was work today?”

  “Pretty good, sir.”

  “Where were you patrolling?”

  “Market Street most of the day. They’ve got the riverfront market opening tomorrow.”

  He winces. “God, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right, sir. It was pretty smooth.”

  “What’s going on?”

  So, I tell him about my conversation with Chief Peterson.

  When I finish, Mr. Somerset says, “Well, I guess it’s good to know I left my mark on the department.”

  “Oh! Oh no, sir. God, no, that’s not what he meant—”

  “Sam, it’s okay. I was joking. I mean, there was some self-pity mixed in there too, but it was mostly a joke.” He cracks a smile. “Fifty-fifty.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I smile back, but it feels pretty miserable.

  “Let’s try that again,” Mr. Somerset says. “I can see why that would be frustrating, getting that kind of feedback. Especially when that’s not a part of the job most people would anticipate.”

  “I’m not saying Chief Peterson’s wrong, sir. I just—I don’t know what to do.” And then, even though I’ve been there less than five minutes, I ask the question I told myself not to ask: “Would you hire me? If it were you, I mean.”

  This time, Mr. Somerset grins. “Sam.”

  When I say, “I know,” it’s a lot grumpier than I mean it to be.

  For some reason, that makes Mr. Somerset smile even bigger. And I can’t help myself after a few seconds, and I’m smiling too.

  “You know there’s a pretty easy solution to this,” Mr. Somerset says. When I don’t say anything, he continues, “You establish some community relationships so you can prove to Peterson that you can do the work he wants you to do.”

  “Right. Okay. Yeah, I can do that.” It does sound pretty easy, now that Mr. Somerset pointed it out. “Uh, so, where would you volunteer, sir?” And because Mr. Somerset says it’s better when people think for themselves and when they take the initiative—and because one time, Mr. Hazard wanted to go to bed and I’d stayed too late talking and he said I’d probably be able to think more clearly if I didn’t have Mr. Somerset’s dick in my mouth—I hurry to add, “I mean, there’s my gran’s church.”

  “That could work,” Mr. Somerset says. “Do you have a connection there? Besides your grandma, I mean. Do you worship there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you could still ask. Or you could find something you’re passionate about, Sam. I think that would be more meaningful. What are some things that you care about? Something you’d like to advocate for?”

  Before I can answer, the front door opens, and Mr. Hazard’s voice carries into the house.

  “—because it looks like a fucking trap when you’re lying in wait for me to get home.”

  And then another voice answers, and it’s Detective Dulac. “Bro, I wasn’t lying in wait. That’s some Renaissance Faire bullshit. I just pulled up and—”