I’d had two days to sit with it. Two days to turn it over, examine it from every angle, hold it up to the light, and look for the flaw I knew had to be there. And I’d found it, the way I always did. The explanation that fit the shape of every fear Craig Dutton had ever planted in me.
Ben was kind. Ben was decent. Ben tore down fences for little boys and crouched at eye level to talk to children who were scared. Everything he’d done could be explained as a man who cared about Jolly’s happiness and, by extension, William’s.
A man who was good to his neighbor because that’s who he was. Not because he wantedme.
I was the one who’d taken ordinary kindness and decided it was desire.
He’d kissed me because the night William had gone missing, I’d been crying and he was the kind of man who leaned toward someone in pain instead of away.
Honorable. Principled.
Then he’d come to his senses. He told me why he stopped, and it was decent and right and everything Craig would never have been.
But the stopping was the part that had stayed.
“Kayla Cafferty, you are staring into the middle distance like a woman in a prescription drug commercial.”
Trish materialized beside me with the speed and stealth of someone who had honed her approach skills on toddlers. Her sunglasses were pushed up on her head, her tote bag was overflowing with folders and PTA paperwork, and her expression carried the particular energy of a woman who had arrived with an agenda.
“I’m watching for William.”
“You’re brooding. I know brooding when I see it. I married Gary. The man broods about lawn care.” She set her tote on the hood of my car without asking. “So. When is the hot dog guy taking you out?”
I closed my eyes. “Please stop calling him that.”
“He’s hot. He has a dog. I’m being efficient.” She said it with the satisfaction of a woman who had coined a phrase and intended to use it until the end of time. “Seriously, though. After the assembly? After the way that man looked at you in the gym like you’d personally invented oxygen. Something has to be happening.”
“Nothing is happening.”
“Nothing.”
“He hasn’t asked me out, Trish.”
She pulled her sunglasses off her head and stared at me. “I’m sorry. The man who tore down part of a fence for your son, brought you tea, and volunteered to perform for two hundred screaming children because you mentioned it in passing… That’s the same man who hasn’t asked you out?”
“That’s correct.”
“Is he in a coma?”
“He kissed me.” I said it fast, before I could talk myself out of it. “After the night William went missing. In my kitchen. And then he stopped.”
Trish went very still. Even the parking lot chaos seemed to recede slightly, the way the world did when Trish decided something required her full attention.
“Stoppedwhy?”
“Because I’d had one of the worst nights of my life. And William was sleeping upstairs.” I shrugged, and the casualness of it cost me more effort than anything I’d done all day. “He was being responsible.”
“That sounds like a good man.”
“Or a man who realized he didn’t actually want to.”
Trish’s mouth opened then closed. She studied me for a long moment.
“Okay,” she said. “Walk me through theor. Because from where I’m standing, responsible and not-interested look very different, and you seem to be squinting at them until they blur together.”
I looked at the mountains. It was easier than looking at Trish. “Think about it. Really think about it. He moves in next door. He’s got a dog my son falls in love with. He opens the fence because of Jolly and William, not because of me. He does the assembly because he’s a K9 handler and that’s what K9 handlers do for community outreach—it wasn’t some grand gesture.”
“But…”
