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“I’m not myself. I’m dead.”

Well, that was putting it baldly.

The way he was sitting he looked like a calendar shot for working men. He had his boots on the fender, his forearms on his thighs. He had always been good looking and fit and girls had thrown themselves at him. But he’d also always been emotionally unavailable, joked at inappropriate times, and moody as hell.

None of that had changed.

Here he was being morose on my birthday and I felt bad about it.

This was why we had a toxic friendship.

He never really considered my feelings.

“Can you explain to me what you’re really doing here,” I said. “Big picture. What’s the goal?”

“I don’t know the goal. I screwed up and did something I wasn’t supposed to and now I’m back to the beginning, I guess you could say. Like a game board. You pull the wrong card and they send you straight back to start.”

I had known that but it still sounded ominous. “What did you do?”

“I looked at some paperwork that was classified.”

That told me nothing. “What did you see?”

“I can’t tell you.”

I sighed. This was going nowhere.

“Is this about James? Because I’m starting to think he took his own life.” I dug my phone out of my back pocket and scrolled through social media. “Look. Joy, his ex-wife, who I thought might be the kind to get angry and poison his drink, was in Hocking Hills the day he was killed. That’s three hours away, so she couldn’t have killed him.”

I tried to show him the pictures of Joy sitting in an Adirondack chair on the deck of a cabin but Ryan barely glanced at them.

“Ryan. You’re freaking me out.”

He climbed down off of the car hood and reached out like he was going to hug me before he realized he couldn’t. “Happy Birthday, Red. I’ll catch you on the flip side.”

That gave me pause. “Are you disappearing forever on me on my birthday? Because that would really annoy me.”

“Nope. I’m just giving you and Marner a break from me.”

“Look me in the eye and promise,” I demanded.

That got a reaction finally. His head finally snapped up. “What? Don’t be weird.”

His reaction made me feel better. He sounded more like himself. “You don’t be weird.”

“Weirdo.”

“Jerk.”

“Go back to your boyfriend.”

“Go back to your paperwork.”

He started laughing. “Glad to see some things never change.”

Then he was gone.

I didn’t think I was ever going to get used to that.