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The station was quiet on a Sunday. Darnell hadn’t been wrong when he’d called bullshit on my excuse, but the station wasn’t a bad place if you needed somewhere to go. When it was busy, it was busy—and busy was good, because busy didn’t leave time to think. And when it wasn’t busy, well, it was quiet.

The station wasn’t big enough to have a rack room, but everybody knew that if you needed to catch some sleep, you could use one of the bunks in the jail. I’d done it before. Even Saint Somerset had done it, back before Emery had shown up and sprinkled his life with fairy dust, back when he’d been a drunk and a cheater, his whole life a fucking wreck. People forgot about that sometimes.

It’s not real sleep, not in a cell, but I was out for a couple of hours, and when I got up, the headache had moved behind my eyes . Back at my desk, I took a couple of Tylenol, drank some of the stale coffee that had been cooking on the hot plate all morning, and considered—and then decided against—the stale pastries Ruthie Bates had brought in.

Alone in the bullpen, I stared at my computer monitor. Things were slow in Wahredua. No secret human trafficking rings. No bullshit with the Ozark Volunteers. Not even something as ordinary as a meth lab blowing up. So, we made up work to keep ourselves busy—and the taxpayers happy.

My current project, for example. Acting Chief Roy Peterson, who was still filling Saint Somerset’s shoes, had thought it would be a great idea if the Wahredua PD collaborated with Wroxall College’s campus security on a safe sex initiative. Well, who better to help than the resident department fuckboy?

The thought rolled through me like a wave: he’s going to leave.

I had to grip the edge of the desk and focus on breathing to stave off the panic. The safe sex initiative was three-pronged, focused on raising awareness about human trafficking (thanks to my boy John-Henry and, of course, Emery), as well as establishing positive relationships with vulnerable communities like the LGBTQ (it helped that I was a faggot fuckboy), and of course, addressing the usual college-age issues that cropped up: consent, sexual assault, STIs (cue the resident fuckboy with a giant syringe of penicillin), and, thanks to the rise of sites like MyFans, even the issue of sex work had become much more prevalent for new adults.A new concern (or, new er ) was doxxing—when someone’s private information was outed, usually with the intent to shame or punish them.

He’s going to leave. He’s going to leave you, and you’ll be all alone.

So far, the boys at campus security had been about as useful as—

He’s going to leave. He’s going to leave. He’s going to leave.

I squeezed my eyes shut and drew a deeper breath. I flattened my hands on the desk. Planted my feet on the floor. That was good. Darnell leaving would be good. For him, anyway. The sooner he left, the sooner he’d be able to get on with his life, instead of this. Whatever we were doing.

After a few more deep breaths, I turned my attention back to the screen. The reality, when it came to a safe sex initiative like this one, was that there were some big problems standing in the way of it. Three big problems, at the very least. First, college kids were stupid. That was just a fact. Second, they were horny—again, just a fact. And third, they were still figuring out how to deal with attention, especially sexual attention.

The last part, to be fair, a lot of adults struggled with. That was why you were always reading about guys caught with their johnsons hanging out, or women who ran off with the pool boy. Or the pool girl, for that matter. Most people knew what it felt like: that rush of hormones when you caught someone looking at you from the other end of the bar, or across the dance floor, or through the crush of bodies at a party. Most people recognized the surge of hormones. The tilt of a head. The lingering glance. Even when you were older, even when you should know better. Even when he was a little too fratty, even for you, and a little too cocky, even for you, and he wore a Red Sox ball cap backward. Even if he said, without any sense of how ridiculous it sounded, Daddy is going to wreck you .

So, it wasn’t really fair to say it was college kids who didn’t know how to deal with it. That was why everybody from congressmen to teachers to, hell, the President of the United States fucked up occasionally. That was how you ended up in a darkened bedroom that smelled like laundry detergent, with a pillowcase over your head, and one of the squad had brought a fucking beer with him like your ass was a pool party.

That was how you ended up with a face full of glass.

The thought darted out of the darkness at the back of my head. It was gone again before I could catch it, nothing more than an echo—or, maybe, an eddy in the water.

What had happened to the kid? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t any of my business. I had my own shit to worry about, and anyway, it’s not like I could help him. The investigation would be handled by the sheriff’s department. If there was an investigation. If it went any further than the detectives asking a few questions before they wrote the whole thing off as fuck-up kids fucking up, as usual.

What they couldn’t tell you, when you woke up after something like that, was you didn’t understand. They tried telling you. And your brain took the information in, did its best to process it. And it all seemed to make sense. But you didn’t understand, not really. It was all too big. And so, all you could do was lie there, trying to get your head around it, not understanding why it didn’t make sense.

I wished someone had told me, just said flat out: you don’t understand yet.

But you will.

I placed the call without really thinking about it.

“Wahredua General Hospital,” a pert voice answered. “How may I direct your call?”

“This is Gray Dulac with the Wahredua PD. I’m trying to track down someone who was admitted early this morning. Facial injuries, I think. Something about a party. The sheriff’s department asked me to come in for an interdepartmental task force.”

Interdepartmental task force is the ten-inch dick of bureaucracies. Five minutes later, I had a name—Thomas Wheeler—and a room number.