"She's going to be fine," Callie said.
"I know. Doesn't stop me from worrying."
"That's the job description."
They sat with the wine and the dark and the sound of water against the shore. The woodsmoke thinned and then was gone, replaced by the clean cold smell of pine and lake water. Somewhere across the lake, a door closed. A dog barked once and stopped.
The stars were out now, more than you could count, the kind of sky that only existed this far from cities. The Milky Way was visible as a pale band running north to south, and the mountains were black silhouettes cut out of the starfield like shapes in construction paper. It was beautiful. It was always beautiful. And tonight Noah let himself feel it instead of looking past it.
Noah thought about Kline for a moment.
He pushed it down. Not tonight. Tonight was the porch and the wine and the woman beside him who was about to move her things into a house she had already made her own.
"You know what I keep thinking?" Callie said.
"What?"
"That this is the first evening in weeks where neither of us has looked at a case file."
"Don't jinx it."
She smiled. He felt it more than saw it.
They stayed on the porch until the cold drove them inside. Callie rinsed the glasses. Noah locked the front door and checked the windows the way he did every night now, a habit he'd developed since the first shooting that he wasn't sure he'd ever lose.
Ethan's door was closed. Light underneath. Music playing softly, something Noah didn't recognize.
He stood in the hallway for a moment. Callie came up behind him and put her hand on his back. She looked at the light under the door, then at Noah, and said nothing. She didn't need to.
They went to bed. The house settled around them. The lake was silent outside the window. For a few hours, the investigation and the secrets didn't exist. There was just the dark and the quiet and two people lying close enough to hear each other breathe.
It wouldn't last. Noah knew that. The morning would come and the case would be there and the names would be waiting. But tonight was tonight, and he let himself have it.
21
"You picked the right night for it," someone said and glasses clinked.
The restaurant patio was full. White tablecloths caught the last of the evening light and threw it back in soft gold. Wine bottles stood open on every table. Candles flickered inside glass holders. The smell of grilled meat and fresh bread drifted from the kitchen. Forty people sat in clusters of four and six, politicians and lawyers and local business owners, the kind of crowd that gathered when someone was raising money and the food was good enough to justify the check.
Richard Kline was at the center table. He had his back to the street and a glass of red in his hand. He was talking to a woman beside him, leaning in slightly, his other hand resting on the white cloth near his plate. He was laughing at something.
The shot came through the gap between two buildings across the street.
Kline's body pitched forward. His chest hit the table edge. The wine glass shattered in his hand. His plate slid off the cloth and broke on the stone patio. The woman beside him didn't scream immediately. She stared at the blood spreading acrossthe white tablecloth for two full seconds before the sound came out of her.
Then everything happened at once.
Chairs scraped. People shouted. A man at the next table threw himself to the ground, pulling his wife down with him. A waiter dropped a tray of glasses that exploded on the flagstone. Someone near the door ran inside. Someone else ran toward the street. Two women crouched behind a planter box, one of them crying, the other staring straight ahead with her mouth open and no sound coming out.
Kline was face down on the table. His phone sat beside his plate, the screen still lit. A notification from a calendar app glowed beneath a smear of wine and blood. The candle on the table was still burning.
No one knew where the shot came from. No one heard it. At two hundred and fifty yards, suppressed, through an urban gap between buildings, the round had arrived before the sound could register. There was no crack, no echo, no direction to run toward or away from. Just a man falling forward and the world rearranging itself around the absence of an explanation.
A patron near the patio railing was on the phone with 911 within thirty seconds. The restaurant manager locked the interior doors. A busboy stood at the kitchen entrance, holding a bread basket, staring at the blood on the tablecloth. He didn't move for a long time. Two off-duty officers who had been at a table near the back drew their weapons and moved toward the street, scanning rooftops and alleys, finding nothing. One of them shouted for everyone to get inside. Half the patio listened. The other half was already running in the wrong direction, toward the street, toward the gap between the buildings where the shot had come from.
Someone was screaming Kline's name. A man in a blue blazer was pressing his dinner napkin against the wound, the whitelinen turning red in his hands. He was saying "stay with me" to a man who had stopped being with anyone the moment the round hit him.
As for the shooter, he was already gone.
