“I’m not saying never,” she amended. “I just want to—”
“Like, what other evidence could we possibly need at thispoint?” I asked. Then, when she didn’t answer: “Hello? Are you even listening to me right now?”
“Am I—yes!” Holiday snapped. “I’mflustered,Michael, will you give me a second?”
I frowned. “Why are you—why, because we—?” I pointed back and forth between us, weirdly unable to say it.
“No!” Holiday exclaimed. Then, seeming to realize that it wasn’t an answer that would hold up to even the most casual scrutiny: “I mean, yes, of course because we—” She broke off.
“Okay…,” I said uncertainly, feeling an unpleasant heat creeping up out of my collar. “I mean, I’m sorry. I thought it was pretty obvious we needed a cover.”
Holiday blew out a breath. “Of course we did, I just—”
“So then why are you mad at me?”
“I’m notmadat you,” she insisted, in the voice of a person who was definitely, unequivocally mad at me. “I just—”
“You justwhat,exactly?”
“Nothing!” Holiday huffed a noisy breath, raking her tangle of hair back. “Whatever. It’s fine. Like you said, we needed a cover.”
“I know,” I agreed, aware that my own voice was kind of obnoxious but not particularly caring. I felt guilty and defensive without quite knowing why—it was like she was accusing me of something, but only vaguely, leaving me half a set of clues. “I mean, I just hope it doesn’t get back to Greer.”
Holiday made a face at that, leaning back against the porch railing. “Well,” she promised, “she won’t hear it from me, I can promise you that much.” She jammed her hands into the pocketsof her giant sweater—or she tried to, anyway, except she wasn’t wearing a giant sweater with pockets, she was wearing a shirt with fiddly little fabric-covered buttons and a neckline I’d been trying not to look at all night long. “Okay,” she said, wiping her palms on the seat of her jeans instead. “Anyway.”
“Anyway,” I agreed, only to snap my jaws shut one more time as the front door of the lax house creaked open, a couple of guys from the team looking at us a little oddly as they ambled out. Probably this wasn’t the ideal venue for a private conversation about whether or not our star forward was also possibly a cold-blooded killer. “Anyway,” I repeated once they were gone, more quietly this time. “Tell me again why you don’t think we should go to the police?”
“Honestly?” Holiday shrugged. “I’m not convinced Hunter’s our guy.”
“What?”I whirled on her, a wave of disbelief and annoyance crashing over me like the ocean slamming into the rocks at Spectacle Island in winter. “You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not,” she said. “And we’ve made the mistake of going off half-cocked in the past, so this time I want to be sure—”
“You meanI’vegone off half-cocked.” I cringed at the memory of how I’d acted back on Martha’s Vineyard, immediately irritated at her for even bringing it up. “This isn’t like that.”
“Are you sure?” Holiday pressed, then continued before I could answer. “Can I ask you something? Do you like Hunter as a suspect so much because you actually think he killed Bri, or do you like him as a suspect so much because you let him bully you intodrinking a goldfish and he slept with Greer while you guys were broken up?”
Oh, that pissed me off. “First of all, he didn’t bully me into anything,” I informed her, heading toward her across the sagging porch. “I drank that goldfish because I wanted to. And second of all, I like him as a suspect so much because he was verifiably at the crime scene the night of the murder and he’s got pictures of my girlfriend in her underwear in his desk like a fucking freak!”
“If itwaseven a crime scene,” Holiday shot back.
That stopped me. “What?”
“I’m just saying.” Holiday folded her arms and stepped neatly past me, pacing back and forth across the porch. She was shivering; it was freezing out here, though I’d been too distracted to register the cold until right now. “We need tothinkfor a minute, okay? We need to be rational and strategic about this. We can’t just go careening all over the place, following your every random impulse wherever it takes us.” She was talking fast, cheeks flushed and eyes bright when she turned to face me. “I don’t even know what’s real and what’s not, here.”
All at once I felt myself get very, very still. “Holiday,” I said. “What are we actually talking about right now?”
“What?” Holiday blanched, a look of sheer unadulterated panic crossing her face in the half second before she blinked it away. “Nothing. I mean, we’re talking about the case, obviously.” She shook her head like she was trying to clear it, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I’m not thinking clearly,” she admitted. “Maybe I drank too much.”
I frowned. “Did you drink anything? I didn’t drink anything.”
“That’s not the point, Michael!” Holiday threw her hands up. “Look,” she said finally, “we got what we came for, right? We’ve got the photos. And there’s no harm in taking a day or two to figure out whether or not that’s enough to get us…wherever it is we’re trying to go.” She sighed. “In the meantime, I’m going to take off. I’ll see you at the game tomorrow, okay?”
“Right,” I said. The annual Harvard-Yale game was the following morning, this year’s matchup in a football rivalry dating back to 1875. It was an all-day affair, the tailgating starting pretty much as soon as the sun came up, the Square filled with wealthy alumni from both universities eager to relive their glory days. On the way over here we’d passed a middle-aged guy in loafers and pleated khakis getting kicked out of a bar on Mass Ave while singing the Yale fight song at the top of his lungs. “Look, Holiday—”
“Yeah?” This was quick.
“I—” I broke off. I wanted to apologize to her, but I couldn’t decide what for, exactly. Kissing her, I guess, but I wasn’t actually sorry for that. I’d meant what I said—we’d needed a cover—but there was also a part of me that had always wondered what it might be like, that had looked over at her a million times in the car and in the library and on the Charles River Esplanade and thought:What if?Now I knew—I didn’t think I’d ever be able to unknow it, honestly—but still in some strange way it felt like the wondering itself was the thing I ought to be sorry for. “Are we okay?” I finally asked.
