“We can’t take him back,” Shaw said quietly.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “North—”

  “He’s not a stray kitten, Shaw. He’s the son of a state senator. He’s an unemancipated minor. He’s legally a runaway, and that means harboring him is against the law. We’d lose our licenses.”

  “No one would ever find out.”

  “It’s not ethical. He belongs with his parents. On top of that, we made a commitment. We gave our word to find him. Those people trust us.”

  “They fired us. We don’t work for them anymore. And when we found Danny, you didn’t care that we didn’t tell Lee. That was a job too. You didn’t say anything about that.”

  “That’s different. You know that’s different.”

  “He’s scared out of his mind, North. He’s shaking. I’m not taking him back.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “I think it is. I think we have a responsibility to do what’s best for him.”

  “We are doing what’s best for him!” North tried to tamp down the shout; part of him was vaguely aware that he might be overheard, but most of him was too busy struggling with his anger to care. “He’s a child. You can’t just put him out on the streets with no identity and no resources and expect him to be able to take care of himself. He’ll be turning tricks and hooked on street shit in less than a week, Shaw. That’s it. That’s the end of his life. Is that what you want?”

  “Obviously not. But I’m not going to force him to go back when he desperately doesn’t want to. Things were so weird with his parents; we both felt it. I don’t want to put him in the middle of that again.”

  “He’s almost eighteen. We asked him if he was being abused. He said no. He doesn’t like being there? Tough shit. He can stick it out for a few more months; Christ, I did it.”

  Shaw’s face softened, but it was actually more upsetting that way. “So that’s what this is about.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “This is another rich, spoiled kid running away from his problems, and you don’t like that. If you could pull yourself up by your bootstraps, so can he. North McKinney versus every rich, pampered, prissy son of a bitch in the entire world.”

  “You’re being a dick about it, but yeah, there’s something to that. If I did it, so can he. I didn’t want to be with my dad, but I didn’t have the luxury of running away and assuming the world would bend over backwards to make sure my life still turned out all right.”

  “People’s choices aren’t always about how much money they come from. Not everything in life is about money.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “It’s not my fault your parents didn’t have money. It’s certainly not Flip’s. The whole time I’ve known you, you’ve had a chip on your shoulder against anybody you thought was better off, even though nobody else ever cared if you had money or didn’t. You couldn’t let it go. And now you’re allowing it to affect your judgment about this.”

  “Nobody else cared?” North laughed. “Right, Shaw. Whatever. Fuck you. This is you easing your white, rich, privileged guilt by telling me money doesn’t matter. I’ve heard it before. I’m sure I’ll hear it again. But just in case you forgot, you’re my boyfriend; you’re not my fucking therapist.”

  “It sure feels like I am sometimes. Especially when you refuse to see one.”

  North was aware of his shredded, accelerated breaths.

  “I shouldn’t have said that.” Shaw’s voice was thick, and he looked down at Flip. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. I’m sorry.”

  “We can take him to child services,” North said. He didn’t even recognize the words as his. He didn’t feel like he was inside his own body anymore; someone else was driving now. “I’m not going to let you dump him on the streets, and I’m not going to let you put yourself and the business at risk, but I’m trying to meet you partway. We can take him to child services, and he can tell them why he doesn’t want to go home, and we’ll do whatever we can after that.”

  “He doesn’t want to go to child services.”

  North dragged a hand down his face; a cold, dark wave of exhaustion crashed over him. “Then do whatever you want, Shaw. You always do. And you can be the one to tell them that their son is gone just like their daughter. You can look them in the eye and tell them that.”

  Flip let out a tiny cry. He shrank down, curling up inside the circle of Shaw’s arm, eyes squeezed shut.

  “Flip—” Shaw began.

  “I’ll go,” he whispered. “Stop fighting. Stop. Just stop.” He opened his eyes. “I’ll go home.”

  Chapter 28

  FLIP MADE THEM GO to the police.

  “So there will be a record,” he said.

  “A record of what?” Shaw asked.

  But Flip wouldn’t say anything else, and North either didn’t hear or didn’t care, and eventually, Shaw had to call Diamond as they drove Flip to the station.

  After that, the hours lengthened and took on a cross-eyed kind of doubling, blurred by exhaustion both emotional and physical. Much of the time, Shaw and North waited at Diamond’s desk in the Juvenile Division’s squad room. A beefy detective was the only other occupant; the collar of his dress shirt was yellow with sweat and age, and he passed the time by playing word games on his phone and rolling clove cigarettes while he pretended not to keep an eye on them. A pregnant woman staggered past them, strapped into a backpack vacuum and sweeping the hose back and forth carelessly. On top of a filing cabinet at the next workstation, a coffee maker gurgled and hissed, coffee dripping into the pot until only a single, fat drop hung suspended. It had a fairytale quality, a world locked in stasis by a magic spell, and when it finally fell with a plonk, Shaw shuddered and covered his face with his hands, his eyes so dry the lids seemed to stick.

  “You can go home,” Diamond said.

  Shaw jerked out of the half-doze, wiped his mouth, and blinked. He’d left a wet patch the size of a softball on North’s shoulder.

  “We’ll need to talk to you again. There are things he’s saying that don’t add up, and we’ll have follow-up questions. But you can go.”

  “What doesn’t add up?”

  Diamond shook her head. “Raskowski and I are driving him home right now. My gut tells me that it’s going to be a circus, but if you want to come, you can follow us. You might even get your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  Shaw glanced at North, but North was looking straight ahead, his face washed clean of any emotion.

  “We’d better not,” Shaw said.

  “Want to do the kid a favor, then? The jackals are already showing up. You could keep their attention while Raskowski and I take him out the back.”

  Still nothing from North; a failing fluorescent cast a faint, fluttering shadow across one side of his face.

  “Yeah,” Shaw said. “Ok.”

  When they stepped out of the building, Shaw recognized two women from local TV stations, complete with cameras and lights and vans. A dumpy-looking guy in sweats and battered kicks must have been print journalism’s delegate, probably from the Post-Dispatch. The camera lights flared. Voices swelled. Shielding his eyes from the glare, Shaw stuck close to North as they hurried to the GTO. He had been sure there were only three of them, but now, blinded by lights, he would have sworn that dozens were thronging them.

  “—tell us anything about Philip’s condition—”

  “—allegations of sexual abuse by staff, can you comment—”

  “—true that he was being held prisoner in a bunker on campus—”

  No matter how many times Shaw and North repeated, “No comment,” the journalists hounded them all the way to the car. When the doors finally thunked shut, steel and glass dropped the volume to a tolerable level, although one woman with teased-out hair and a recent round of lip fillers shouted at North through the window, holding out the microphone at intervals as though the GTO might like to make a comment. The guy in the battered kicks kept looking at an ancient Impala parked down the street, as though considering following them.

  “Fucking hyenas,” North growled as he started the car.

  They drove home; no one followed them. North parked in the garage, and they let themselves into the house. The puppy was going wild with barking, and North let him out of the crate. Instead of his usual combination of inspecting North, prancing with joy, and offering the occasional warning bark to Shaw, the puppy shot into the kitchen. North and Shaw found him at the back door, which hung ajar. The puppy was sniffing furiously.

  “God damn it,” North said as he shut the door and locked it. He scooped up the puppy, who now turned his full attention to licking North’s hand, face, and neck—wherever he could reach. Then he powered down Shaw’s laptop, where their poor excuse for a dog sitter had probably been watching porn. “I don’t know which one is less responsible: Truck or Pari.”

  “At least they took care of the puppy.”

  North grunted. After checking the dog’s water and food, he opened the fridge and took out a Schlafly. He carried it to the table; when he sat, the puppy jumped out of his lap and sprinted over to yip a reminder warning at Shaw. Shaw squatted, holding out his fingers, which the puppy sniffed dubiously and then offered a tentative lick. North was hitting the Schlafly hard, pounding down the first one, Adam’s apple bobbing as he drank. The light made him an outline of gold and shadow; the glass glinted in his hand.

  “North, I’m really sorry.”

  He finished the beer and set the bottle down. He picked up the bottle cap and rolled it on its edge.

  “Flip was just so scared, and then I got scared for him, and—”

  “Go to bed, Shaw.” He lifted his hand, and the bottle cap fell flat with a soft clack against the wood. “It’s been a long day. We’re both tired.”

  Grabbing the puppy, Shaw buried his face in the warm fur, eyes stinging. After a moment of the puppy scrambling desperately to be released, Shaw put him down and ran fingers under his eyes. “Ok.” He stopped in the hall to ask, “Are you coming too?”

  The answer was North’s heavy steps, the sound of the refrigerator opening, the whisper of another bottle cap coming loose.

  At some point in that night of restless sleeping and waking, Shaw realized North wasn’t coming to bed. He padded out into the living room. North was curled up on the sofa, a too-small throw pulled over him, the puppy curled up under his arm. A half-drunk beer stood on the floor next to him, the label peeled away in large sections, flakes of paper peppering the rug. His only concession to sleep had been to ditch the Redwings; in dingy white socks and with his face softened by sleep, he reminded Shaw of the boy he had met more than eight years ago. Shaw went back to the bedroom, took one of the blankets from the bed, and tucked North in. North grumbled once, rolling onto his side, and his arm tightened protectively around the puppy. But he didn’t wake.

  The days after that seemed unending. Part of it was the surreal feeling of being trapped—the first two days, reporters lurked outside, waiting for North and Shaw to show their faces. Being followed by reporters wasn’t exactly conducive to investigative work, so North delegated their outstanding jobs to Zion and Truck, and North and Shaw holed up in the duplex. Pari picked up two new MacBooks for them, and they tried to rebuild what they had lost in the fire, North restoring files from backups, reaching out to clients, redirecting mail and paperwork for Borealis, and Shaw spending hours on the phone with the insurance company.

  But part of what made the days drag on was that after that first night, Shaw and North had both committed themselves to some kind of inescapable ballet. North set up his laptop in the living room, where he kept ESPN on at a low murmur. Shaw set up his in the kitchen, where the window over the sink looked out on the privacy fence and the alley. When North went into the kitchen for a glass of water, Shaw had to use the bathroom. When Shaw stretched his legs by walking up and down the hall, North needed something in the basement.

  In what Shaw realized was a kind of karmic retribution from the universe, they came closest to each other at moments when they both seemed most vulnerable. North came out of the bathroom with nothing but a towel around his waist, smelling like wet hair and Irish Spring soap, and at the exact same moment, Shaw came around the corner and stumbled into him. They righted each other, mumbled apologies, and separated, but not before Shaw had noticed that North’s eyes were red and his cheeks splotchy. Or when Shaw got tangled in yet more red tape with his insurance company, and he sat on the back stoop to have a vicious, screaming-and-crying-and-venting moment, North let himself in from the alley, tucking a rectangular package of something into his jeans’ pocket.

  North froze and then finished putting whatever it was in his pocket. He crossed the tiny backyard with his usual long stride. “Everything ok?”

  “Peachy.”

  North hesitated; the opening was there.

  “What were you doing in the alley?” Shaw asked.

  North squeezed past him, the smell of cigarette smoke trailing him, and took the steps up into the house in one lunge. Over his shoulder, he said, “Trying not to go out of my fucking mind.”

  Nothing from the Chittendens, although the story was splashed all over the local news, and in what must have been a slow news cycle, even made it to national primetime for a single evening. Someone had coined the phrase “Bunker Boy,” which didn’t come close to the truth but which made a nice spin for a story about a young man with mental health problems who had been found by his loving family.

  The story was so outrageous that Shaw said, “Turn it off.”

  “I want to hear if they mention us.”

  Shaw stood and left.

  Behind him, the volume increased to a roar. Then, a minute later, the TV went silent, and North swore, and something plastic cracked when it hit the wall.

  On Wednesday, the reporters evaporated, drawn by the churn of fresh chum in the waters. That afternoon, Gavin the assistant appeared on their doorstep. He was holding a manila envelope.

  “They’re very grateful.” He held out the envelope, which North took. “This should cover the additional time you spent on the investigation after you parted ways.”

  “After they canned our asses, you mean,” North said.

  “You understand why they’re not officially recognizing your part in this happy ending.”

  “Because they’re lying.” Shaw’s breath hitched in his chest. “Because they’re lying about all of it.”

  “There’s also a little something in here for your discretion.”

  “We’re professionals,” North said. “We don’t talk about our clients, and we don’t need to be bribed.”

  Gavin shrugged. His face was oily in the spring sunlight, and it looked like he might be trying to grow in a wispy mustache. Maybe he’d just hit puberty. “Then consider it an expression of thanks. The senator has also asked me to communicate that she will be recommending your services to her friends.” He waited, probably hoping for the gratitude and awe that ought to have naturally followed a pronouncement of Providence turning her gentle face to them.

  Instead, North spat on the stoop, barely missing Gavin’s shiny oxfords. “Fuck off.”

  The shock on Gavin’s face was the last thing Shaw saw before North shut the door.

  “Sorry,” North mumbled. “If you want to talk to him some more, I’ll apologize.”

  “No.” Shaw tried to figure out what to say, but all he could come up with was “That was perfect.”

  But that night, when Shaw walked into the living room and kissed the back of North’s neck, North walked out of the house without a word and stayed in the alley for forty-five minutes, pinned under the cone of the security light. Shaw had retreated to the bedroom by the time he came back inside; he couldn’t stand the thought of North rejecting him again, even if it was only in his expression.

  On Thursday, Shaw had to get out of the house. He called one of those we’ll-pick-you-up rental car services, and he left without saying a word to North. The last thing he saw, as he pulled the door shut behind him, was North glancing over his shoulder with a question on his face.

  He spent the day shopping. New clothes. New shoes. The most important herbal supplements. Some new tea blends. Body oils and butters and creams. Bath salts. Books. A parchment roll and a quill made from a raven’s feather that had been blessed by the local high priestess of Hecate, who also did real estate, and was he looking to rent or buy? In the clearance aisle of Scent-sory Impressions, he found a candle called Blue Snow Cone. He remembered the summer after freshman year, when he’d been recovering from the Slasher attack, and North bringing him snow cones day after day because Shaw wasn’t eating much and sometimes he was hot with fever. He remembered North getting the Fourth of July flavor—red, white and blue—but only eating the blue because, quote, “blue is the best flavor.” North had sworn for a minute solid when Shaw pointed out he could have ordered a snow cone that was only blue.

  Shaw bought the candle. The knot between his shoulder blades loosened. He took what felt like the first deep breaths in the last week. He tried a new açai bowl. He ate two theater-style boxes of peanut M&Ms. He got a massage, and while Candy dug her elbow into a knot in his back, she told him she made her own CBD oil, and he bought two bottles of it.

  When Shaw came home, loaded down with bags, North was still in the living room, and ESPN was aggressively loud. Two guys were yammering at each other about baseball. One of them had a face like tomato soup.

  North’s head came up; his eyes were chips of ice. “You look like you had a nice day.”

  “I did.” Shaw wobbled, steadied some of the bags, and managed to shut the door with his foot. “I needed to pick up some basics—”

  North started to laugh.

  Heat rushed into Shaw’s face. He shifted; one of the bags slid down his arm, and when he tried to bump it back up, a tub of face cream fell out.

  “I’ll get it,” Shaw said.