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Deputies came instead of the police, which I would have realized if my brain had been working. They hadn’t really seemed to understand what was going on, and by then, Rory had recovered enough to attempt a stammering—and incoherent—excuse. The deputies didn’t really seem to know what to do except put cuffs on Rory and start first aid on me while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Once the paramedics got there, they took one look at me and decided we needed to haul ass to the hospital.

I found out later Eddie showed up. He didn’t see the deputies until it was too late. He’d brought his gun, a shovel, and a bottle of bleach. I wasn’t sure if Rory ever knew how close he’d come to ending up in that ditch next to me. When Brother Gary and Red Alvin finally got there, it must have felt like Christmas.

Turned out I’d been shot in the chest wall, but the more bitchin’ way to say it was that I’d been shot in the pectoral muscle, which meant basically my pecs saved my life. There wasn’t really a bitchin’ way to say I also had a partially collapsed lung. It wasn’t actually all that bad—compared to how getting shot in the chest might have gone. After I got out of surgery for the gunshot wound, they put me on supplemental oxygen with a cannula, but I didn’t have to have a chest tube. I was in the hospital for a couple of days; once the X-rays showed that my lung was reinflating, they told me I could go home.

It was a long two days. A lot of people came to visit: my boy John-Henry, and Emery—who was trying really hard to be nice until he forgot and asked me if the partially collapsed lung would keep me from, quote, fellating any other key suspects in a murder investigation , which was when John-Henry sent him to find a vending machine. Palomo came and was weirdly nice about the whole thing, probably because she assumed—rightly—I was going to get fired. She even brought me this weird chicken casserole she’d made. Emery took it home when he found out I was going to dump it. Foley came with his wife and a million kids, all of them looking like that miserable Irish fuck. Clark Kent came and got so nervous that he tried to leave by going into the bathroom. He stayed in there so long I almost forgot about him, and one of the nurses totally freaked out when she opened the door.

Darnell didn’t come, but not because he was an asshole. He texted, and I told him I was okay. I needed time to think. He sent flowers, though. In some ways, that made it harder.

When they released me, I checked myself out and took an Uber to the Bridal Veil Motor Court. You could pay by the week there.

It turned out to be a lot less fun than being in the hospital. The pain was constant, even when I took what they’d sent me home with. Nobody showed up and brought you flowers. Nobody stopped by just to check on you. No turn-down service. I mean, not unless you counted housekeeping, and if you paid by the week, they only came on Saturdays. The room was tiny and old and dingy, and I had to wear a sling to reduce the strain on my healing muscles, which made moving around in the cramped space even more difficult.

One evening, Peterson came over, and we had a long talk.

And, finally, I made a decision.

My boy John-Henry showed up early on a Tuesday morning and helped me downstairs. I could have done it on my own. Probably. My car was still being held—I wasn’t sure if the deputies were really still processing it, or if this was just another of their typical fuckups. So, I got in the minivan. In the middle row, because Emery was driving. It felt a little like my gay dads were taking me to soccer practice, which also could have been the start of a really raunchy porno. I told Emery, and he told me they’d gotten me coffee, so why didn’t I drink my coffee and shut the fuck up?

When we got to the house, Darnell’s car was in the driveway. It was another of those summer days that had started at uncomfortably warm and was only going to get worse. Darnell had done some yardwork. He’d put down a bed of white rock along one side of the house, and it glowed incandescent in the sunlight. The rosebush was gone.

“I’ll let him know we’re here,” John-Henry said, unbuckling himself.

“He knows we’re here,” I said. “And he knew we were coming.” I got out of the van. “Give me a second.”

I hesitated when I got to the door. And then I knocked.

Darnell opened the door a moment later. His eyes were red. He hadn’t shaved. He braced himself with one arm across the doorway, and I wondered if that was on purpose, or if it was just body language giving more away than he intended.

“Hey,” I said.

He gave me a stiff nod. And then, after a moment, “I boxed everything up.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

He didn’t say anything. But he didn’t move either. And then he said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

For a few seconds, he stared at me. And then he moved into the house and disappeared into his office. I caught the door with my leg and motioned for John-Henry and Emery.

True to his word, Darnell had packed up all my stuff. It was all labeled too, which gave Emery an instant boner. With my arm in a sling, I couldn’t carry much, so I mostly told them what to do. Emery tried to ignore me, but he did that thing where he got angrier and angrier and quieter and quieter, so that was awesome. And John-Henry just rolled with it until he finally said, “Knock it off, Gray.”

It was all done in less than an hour. And then, somehow, I was standing in the kitchen, just me and Darnell, alone.

“Did you want to take a look around?” Darnell said in that same stiff, polite voice. “I don’t think I missed anything, but you can check.”

“I trust you,” I said.

He folded his arms across his chest and looked off, away from me.

“I wanted to talk, actually. If you have a minute.”

“I need to get back to work.”

“Please.”

A hint of color rose behind his beard, but he still wasn’t looking at me when he said, “Now you want to talk, so I have to talk. But when I was worried about you, when I wanted to come see you in the hospital, that wasn’t convenient for you. I guess you didn’t have time between having every male nurse in that hospital jerk you off.”

I burst out laughing. After a moment, a smile touched Darnell’s mouth. Barely there. But his eyes came back to me.

“I missed you,” I said. My eyes felt hot as I corrected myself. “I’m going to miss you.”

His mask slipped. It was only a moment, but the raw pain there was worse than I’d expected, and this time, I was the one who had to look away. Through the back door, I could see a wedge of sky above the houses behind us. Birds flew in a ragged vee, and it made me think of a needle pulling dark thread.

“It’s funny,” I said. “If I hadn’t been so—so fucking selfish, none of this would have happened. The case, I mean. If I hadn’t been so fixated on Tip.”

“They said you found that boy who killed him. Emery said they have the knife with his fingerprints on it.” It sounded like it cost Darnell to say, “That was a good thing, what you did.”

“Was it? I don’t know. For Tip, I guess. It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like a long string of fuckups, and something good eventually came out of it.” I adjusted my sling. “I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Okay, not reading so much. But I’ve been watching all these TikTok videos.”

Darnell groaned. “Gray.”

Laughing, I said, “Bro, it’s basically the same thing.” He didn’t say anything, and after several seconds, I fiddled with my sling again as I said, “I think I’m, like, a narcissist.”

“Oh my God,” Darnell said. I flashed a look at him in time to see him roll his eyes. “You’re not a narcissist.”

“Uh, yeah, I think—”

“No, you’re not.” Then he cracked that tiny smile again. “I bet you wish you were, though.”

For a few seconds, I couldn’t say anything. And then—more of a squawk than I would have liked—“Darnell, what the fuck?”

“You can be pretty self-absorbed,” Darnell said, “but you’ve been dealing with a lot. Believe it or not, you can also be kind and thoughtful and a wonderful partner. When you don’t have your head up your ass.”

I grinned. “You know narcissists love it when you tell them good things about themselves.”

That made him laugh, and some of the hollowness faded from his eyes. He seemed to be considering me again, seeing me like I’d been away for a long time. That was fair; maybe I had. Maybe he had too.

“Do you remember when you sent me flowers?” I hadn’t meant to say it; the words flowed out of me, and I found myself following them. “The first time, I mean. When Emery broke my nose.”

Darnell groaned again, although this time, it was directed at himself.

“Why are you groaning?” I asked. “That was so sweet.”

“I can’t believe how nervous I was.”

“You were super nervous.”

“And that was before I had that heart attack.”

I burst out laughing again, but it faded quickly. “That meant a lot to me. I don’t know if I ever said that. Nobody else cared, but you did. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting…I don’t know.” I almost said to be loved, but it was too much, so I said, “To feel like I mattered, I guess. Or that I was okay. Or enough. I wanted you to know you made me feel like I was loved.”

He blinked and scraped his knuckles under his chin and looked away. Back again. “I do love you.”

“I know.”

“Gray, what are you doing? You’re moving out. Why are you saying this stuff?”

“Because I want you to know.” The birds were almost out of sight now, the last ragged ends of that dark thread being pulled through the edge of the sky. “I don’t know how to explain the last few months. Year, I guess. What it’s been like. For a long time, I thought I knew who I was. How to—how to be , I guess. And then it was all gone, and it was like I didn’t know anything. My face was all fucked up. They put me on leave. Then on desk work. You were trying so hard, and I was so angry, and I took it out on you.”

Darnell wiped his eyes and shook his head.

“I started to realize,” I said, “that what I’d been doing, how I’d been acting, maybe it wasn’t me. Not the real me, anyway. But it was like I didn’t know how to do anything else. How to be anyone else.” My throat was so tight that it was painful. “And I just wanted things to be normal again.”

“You don’t have to be anyone else. I don’t want you to be anyone else.”

“But I do. I mean, in some ways.” A grin cracked my expression. “I definitely want to be less of an asshole.”

“Gray—”

“Maybe it’s an opportunity, like John-Henry said. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just—you can see who you are, I mean, when you take all the shit away. I don’t like this person. Don’t like all the ways I avoided having to deal with the fact that I don’t like myself. Don’t like that I used people. Used you. Because I do love you, and I hate that I hurt you.”

He dragged one sleeve across his face, but it didn’t help; fresh tears spilled down his cheeks. When he tried to speak, nothing came out, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “We can work on that. We can work on all of this. We can figure it out.”

That’s what I’d been thinking about. I mean, obviously. I thought about telling him that I wanted whatever relationship I was in—with him, or with someone else—to be something I went into because I wanted to share my life with someone, and not because I wanted that person to make me feel better about myself. I wanted to be self-sufficient. Whole. Or as close to whole as I could get. I thought about telling him that I needed to fix a lot of stuff in my life. Stuff I’d left unresolved because it was too big and too scary and because it was easier not to deal with it, and in a lot of ways, I’d settled for the easy way out. I wanted to get rid of all the toxic patterns I’d had stamped on my brain—or at least figure out how to manage them better. I wanted to be with someone, I almost said, when I wasn’t so fucking afraid of being alone.

But I asked, “Is that really what you want?”

Darnell mopped his eyes again. He looked off, and the expression on his face was helpless as a weird, unhappy laugh escaped him. “I was at a call center.”

“What?”

“That’s where I went the night—when the police were asking. That’s where I was. And things didn’t go the way I planned, so that’s why I didn’t check into the hotel. You were right about me hoping I could use it as an alibi.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why were you at a call center?”

“Because what they’re doing is totally illegal. They pretend to be from a bank, and they call people and scare them and harass them until they get their account numbers, their passwords, all that stuff. They say there’s a problem with their account. It works a lot of the time. Especially with older people.”

I had to take a moment to process that. “Why the fuck were you at an illegal call center in the middle of the night?”

“To record them doing it. I sent the video off anonymously.” A trace of satisfaction slid into his voice as he added, “They got raided by the Highway Patrol a couple of days later.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“It’s a good email server, and I used a TOR browser—”

“Darnell, what the fuck were you thinking? They could arrest you too!”

“Gray, that doesn’t matter.”

“Are you kidding me? Of course it matters!”

“Stop yelling at me!”

I opened my mouth, and then I decided maybe I had been yelling. A little. I closed my mouth again and raised my hands in surrender.

“I’m not telling you because—” Darnell shook his head. “I’m telling you because—because I’ve been thinking about what you said. About me wanting to fix you. About how I liked that this happened to you.”

“That was a shitty thing to say. I shouldn’t have said it, and I was wrong.”

“Yeah, well, you were wrong. I never would have wanted you to get hurt. And I’m not happy this happened to you. But I think—I think maybe you were right, too. In a way. I mean, when I used to try to catch those guys. And the call center. And I kept thinking about what you said, and it made me so angry I thought I was going to do something really stupid. And then I asked myself, Why is it making you so mad if it isn’t true?” A slight tremble showed in his shoulders. “I don’t know. I thought I was doing something good, and the whole time, I’ve been making things worse.”

“You weren’t making things worse,” I said. And then I stepped over to him. He tensed, but he let me put my arms around him, and after a moment, he hugged me back. We stood there for a while. The heat of him, the smell of detergent on his clothes, the shape of his body. It couldn’t be forever. But it could be now.

When Darnell started to rub my back like now he was comforting me , I laughed and stepped back. A hint of color rose in his cheeks, and he gave a tiny, awkward shrug.

“You didn’t stick a shotgun in anybody’s mouth,” I asked, “did you?”

A smile cracked across his face, but it faded as he spoke again, “Are we making a mistake?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think—I think we need to try.”

He nodded. He stared at the fridge. He moved one of those magnetic chip clips around. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “So, what are you going to do?”

“Besides massive amounts of therapy?”

That made him roll his eyes.

“Peterson and I talked. I really fucked up. I mean, massively. On the other hand, the sheriff’s department closed a murder, and they’ve got all the evidence they need to put Rory away. They also bagged a super creepy state trooper, but even if Rory flips on him, I’m not sure what they’ll charge him with. He’ll lose his job. Maybe that’s enough.”

“What about you?”

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Peterson didn’t exactly say it, but he knows it’d be bad if they kicked me to the curb, which is probably what they should do. The department still has a black eye from everything with John-Henry, and they don’t want to make it worse by getting rid of a hero cop who got shot trying to catch a murderer that the sheriff’s department had pretty much given up on.”

“Peterson called you a hero cop?”

“Nah, that’s my term.”

Another smile stretched across his face. “What’s the other option, if they’re not firing you?”

“Leave. Some sort of counseling program.” I hesitated, and then I added, “I think, maybe, I should do something else. I fucked up bad. I hurt a kid. I don’t know if I should be police.”

“Gray.”

“I’m just saying I don’t know.”

Darnell actually covered his eyes and groaned, “Gray.”

“It’s not as fucked up as John-Henry, though. He’s been doing it this whole time just to piss off his dad. That’s something, right?”

Slowly, he peeled his hands away and gave me a look. And then he said, “You’ll make the right choice.”

“Want to help me out? Tell me what it is?”

He shook his head slowly, but for some reason, he started smiling again. “Take care of yourself, Gray.”

I couldn’t think of the right thing to say, so I said, “You too.”

We hugged, but it was different, and he walked me to the door. Emery and John-Henry were waiting by the van. The sun had climbed higher into the sky, and the air was swimmy with heat, and on my next breath, I tasted July: asphalt and cut grass and gasoline.

Emery passed me, heading toward the house as I got closer to the van.

John-Henry said, “He just wants to check on Darnell.”

I nodded.

He’d never learned how to stop being chief. The way he stood, the way he studied me, all those thoughts he couldn’t turn off. It was kind of funny, because I should have seen it, when we were partners, how good he’d be.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I hit my vape. The breeze felt good on the back of my neck, and the day was bright and clear, and a long way off, children’s voices rose in excited laughter. When I’d been a kid, I remembered, summer had seemed to last forever. “But I will be.”