The table settled with his order, the conversation drifting toward easier things—the new development going up on Route 9, whether the Huckleberry Creek Founders Day parade would survive the new city council, the general and comfortable noise of people who knew how to fill a room together. Daniel helped me clear the plates while Grandpa relocated to his armchair in the living room, and for a few minutes we moved around each other in the kitchen the way we always did, easy and familiar, handing things off without asking.
“He’s getting more creative,” Daniel murmured.
“The sweet tea thing was inspired,” I agreed.
“I saw him set up those two bottles side by side when he pulled them from the fridge.”
I turned to look at him. “He staged it?”
“Deliberately.” Daniel’s mouth was fighting a smile. “Took his time about it, too.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing, because Grandpa had ears like a bat when he wanted to. “He’s going to be insufferable.”
“He already is. We just love him anyway.”
We did. That was the whole of it, really. Grandpa had raised me after my parents died, had given me Sunday dinners and a warm place to land and an absolutely relentless belief that I deserved good things in this life. That his vision of good things included Daniel Costello in a tuxedo was just one of his more persistent quirks.
I handed Daniel the last dish, and our fingers overlapped on the edge of the plate for just a second—the way they sometimes did, the accidental choreography of people who’d been in each other’s orbit long enough that proximity was second nature.
The spark ran from my fingertips straight up to my shoulder, quick and electric, and I pulled my hand back and turned to the drying rack like I had somewhere urgent to be.
It happened sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. A rogue current of something I refused to name, flickering up without invitation before I could get ahead of it. I’d learned to move through it quickly, the way you move through a cold patch in a swimming hole—acknowledge it with your body, dismiss it with your brain, keep swimming.
Daniel set the dish on the counter and leaned against the sink, crossing his arms, talking about something the guys at the station had done involving a raccoon and the engine bay, and I focused on the sound of his voice rather than the way his forearms looked when he crossed them.
The friendship is the thing, I reminded myself. The friendship is the whole point.
Twenty-three years of evidence sat behind that belief like bedrock. He was the person who’d driven me to the hospital at two in the morning when Grandpa had his cardiac scare. The person who kept up with exactly which restaurants served bread and butter pickles on burgers to remind me not to get them, and who was aware of my worst habits and the pitch of my laugh when something actually struck me funny versus when I wasbeing polite. You didn’t gamble that on a feeling that showed up uninvited during dishwashing and would be gone by the time I dried my hands.
“You’re not listening,” Daniel said.
“The raccoon got into the gear locker,” I said. “I heard.”
He gave me a long, measuring stare. Knowing me was, unfortunately, a two-way street.
I kept my expression neutral and folded the dish towel over the oven handle with more attention than it deserved.
“Gus asleep yet?” he asked.
I glanced through the kitchen doorway. Grandpa’s armchair faced away from us, and the quality of silence coming from his direction had the heavy, settled weight of a man whose eyes had closed somewhere around his third mention of wedding venues.
“Out cold.”
“Good.” Daniel pushed off the sink. “Because I ate three helpings of the roast, and I need someone to suffer through a walk with me before I drive home.”
The October air had gone sharp after sundown, the kind of cool that crept in fast once the hills swallowed the last of the light. A walk made sense. Fresh air, movement, the creek path lit up by a half-decent moon. Perfectly reasonable.
The fact that it felt, in some small and traitorous corner of my brain, like the setup to a date—two people, evening air, a sleeping chaperone—was so ridiculous I nearly laughed at myself out loud.
Grandpa would have had a field day with that thought. I buried it accordingly.
“Let me get my coat.”
TWO
DANIEL
My shift had been over for forty minutes, but I was still at the station because Twitch had talked me into a rematch on the ancient foosball table in the common room, which I had won twice already tonight and which he refused to accept as a settled matter. Kyle Russo operated on the assumption that any outcome he didn’t like was a statistical anomaly awaiting correction.
