"I know."
"I've had it a hundred times."
"I know that too." His jaw was still tight, just slightly. "You all right?"
"Fine." I moved back behind the counter. "He barely touched me."
"Barely," Dane said, and left it there, and the word sat between us carrying more weight than one syllable had any right to.
I picked up a glass and polished it and didn't look at him, and the air between us shifted in a way neither of us acknowledged.
I WAS IN THE STOCKROOMsigning for a delivery — four-fifteen, afternoon crowd still running, Dane on his stool — when Huck appeared in the doorway with the particular expression he used for things he didn't want to deliver. Same expression he used for everything else. Eyes carrying different freight.
"Jenna."
"What."
"You need to come look at something."
The "something" was my car, parked in the lot where I always left it during the week. My car, a four-year-old Accord I'd bought with the proceeds of Proof's second profitable quarter and named nothing because I'm not a person who names cars, sitting in the lot with both driver-side windows smashed and glass spread across the concrete.
I registered that first. Then I registered the photo.
Someone had taped an eight-by-ten to the driver's seat. The photo was of me, taken from outside, through the bar's front window. I was behind the counter, head down, pouring. The angle was from the street.
I stood very still and breathed through it.
Dane was beside me before I'd taken two breaths, and when I stepped toward the car he put one hand on my arm, not a grab, just a stop with fingers barely touching my sleeve, and made a short, sharp sound that wasn't a word.
"Don't go closer," he said. "Not yet."
He pulled out his phone and started photographing the car from where we stood, then the lot, then the surrounding buildings. He moved around the perimeter of the space without touching anything and without rushing, and I watched the shift happen in real time — the ease gone, the warmth gone, whatever lived underneath it taking over, stripped down and cold and competent.
It was colder. It was also, and I wasn't proud of this, slightly reassuring.
He called it in. Perry Hebert arrived in twenty minutes with a uniform and a look I'd seen on him once before, the night of the murder — tight around the eyes, jaw working. They went through it. Dane stayed close to me through the whole thing, not crowding, not hovering, just present in a way that I kept noticing and kept trying not to let show.
By the time Hebert left, the afternoon light had gone golden and the lot was quiet again. I had a police report in my hand, two smashed windows, and a photo someone had taken of me through my own front window while I was working.
I flipped the police report over. Put it in my back pocket. Looked at Dane.
"I need to get back," I said.
He looked at me for a long second. "Okay."
WE DIDN'T TALK ON THEwalk back to the apartment after I handed off to Huck.
Three hours before the Saturday night shift, and the banter that had been running between us all week had gone quiet. Not hostile. Different: the air still and heavier than it had been. I made coffee because I needed my hands busy and Dane sat on the far end of the kitchen counter and watched me do it without offering to help or getting in the way, and for a few minutes the only sound was the percolator and Bourbon Street coming through the walls at a distance.
I thought about Beth Kessler.
He'd said it on Friday night, the name and the story. I'd let him and gone back to the bar work because anything else would have been wrong. But I'd been carrying it since, turning it over. How he'd told it mattered as much as the story itself. Flat, no soft edges, no invitation to comfort him. He'd been stating a fact, the way you state a hard truth you've had years to make an imperfect peace with — because that was the only kind available.This is what happened. This is who I am because of it.
I knew that voice. I used it all the time.
I poured two cups and set one at his elbow and leaned against the counter across the narrow kitchen and looked at him.
"The photo was taken through the front window," I said. "They've been watching the bar."
