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“I’ve got more,” Jenny said.

“You’ve clearly talked yourself into believing this is a good idea.”

“Are we going to spend our entire date talking about Danny?”

“So these are official dates now?” Cantor said.

“Look at you. No wonder you made detective at such a young age.”

“Don’t kids post something on Instagram when they’re ‘official’?” Cantor said, putting air quotes around the word.

“I could post something on the Wolves’ Instagram account. We could do a selfie right here. Want to?”

“Did you start drinking before you got here?” he said.

She laughed.

Dinner dates were as far as they’d gotten. But neither one of them had made any kind of move to take things to the next level.

Next level, Cantor?

He felt himself smiling. It even sounded dumb thinking about it that way. Or even joking about their being official. He frankly wasn’t sure exactlywhatthey were, even as he continually second-guessed himself for having any kind of relationship with her at all. And knowing what his bosses would say if they found out about it.

He had beaten her to the restaurant tonight, knowing he would, because she’d told him that she wanted to go home and change after her practice at Hunters Point. So he was already in the big rounded booth as she came walking briskly through the middle of the room, turning heads as she did. Maybe not everybody at Harris’ knew who she was. But a lot of them did.

She was wearing a dress tonight, the first time she’d done that for one of their dinner dates. She apologized for being later than usual. Cantor lied and told her that he’d only beaten her to what billed itself as “the” San Francisco steak house by a couple of minutes.

“You look sensational,” Cantor said.

“Thanks. Usually when I get the urge to dress up, I lie down until it passes.”

“And you did this for my benefit?”

“Don’t push it. Just take the win.”

She leaned down before she slid in next to him and kissed him briefly on the lips.

Then they talked for a few minutes about how well Billy McGee, even as banged up as he’d been after Chinatown, had played on Sunday as the Wolves won again.

Cantor asked if McGee still might be facing disciplinary action just on the optics alone.

Jenny said that she and Billy had a Zoom meeting scheduled with the commissioner, but the head of the players’ union had told her that since there had been no drugs present in Billy’s system when they tested him after Sunday’s game, he really couldn’t see Billy getting suspended for being set up then beaten up.

That was her story, she said, and she was sticking to it.

“Somebody went to a lot of troubletoset him up,” Cantor said.

“If it’s not my brother Jack, I’d like to know who else it could have been.”

“The pictures did go up on Wolf.com at the speed of light,” Cantor said.

“Didn’t they, though?”

“What about the prodigal brother?”

“Danny? It would have been pretty ballsy to go to all that trouble with Billy and then want to come in from the cold.”

“He still could have,” Cantor said.