Page 3 of To All the Guys I Killed Before

But I drop my scowl and do something I’ve rarely done in a year and a half of living next to Hugo: I linger. Hell, I even mimic his crossed-arms mailbox lean as best as I can using all five feet, four inches of me. I’m sure to anyone driving past, it looks like Frodo Baggins trying to have a conversation with Thanos.

If that same passing motorist wanted to risk losing a vital organ to the knife in my front pocket, they might also suggest I was sticking around to unpack some things with the shrink next door. Which I’m not. I’m just sharing my day with my neighbor, like I sometimes do.

Once I’m situated, I tip my head way, way up to meet his gaze, and I find him looking down at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. It’s sharp and penetrating, almost hungry, and my stomach flips at the thought of my hapless, sexless, cringey neighbor ravenous for something.

I quickly look away, not so much flustered by Hugo as by the idea that he’d be able to fluster me at all. But when I look back, that’s dorky Dr. Mohr grinning at me once again. There’s no knowing glint in his eyes, just his awful, hunched-up posture that I privately attribute to some kind of spinal condition.

Annoyed at myself for projecting dark and mysterious onto white-bread wholesomeness, I shake my head and try to recall what we were talking about before my imagination went on a walkabout.

“Sorry, you were asking about my day,” I say, mentally sifting through my cases for the least hair-raising ones. “Things were pretty calm at my office, but it was a wild weekend for the police. They had people out there using all kinds of found objects as weapons.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

A smile lights up his face, and I yet again ponder the waste of potential that is Hugo. In theory, all the individual elements for attractiveness exist in my neighbor. Thick black hair, yes, but he smashes it down with too much gel. Broad shoulders, sure, but they’re constantly covered in lumpy knitwear. Absurdly square jaw…

Okay, that one’s good no matter what.

I clear my throat. “Broken bottles, pool cues, that kind of thing. No fatalities, so nobody from my office got called in. But apparently, one woman squirted ketchup in her date’s face, then beat him with her shoe. Practically took out his eye with a spike heel.”

“Wow,” he says, adjusting his glasses. Truly, it’s a crime against humanity that this jaw was gifted to a man with the fashion sense of a colorblind eighteenth-century Quaker.

I catch a flash of speculation on his face when he asks, “Did Stiletto Guy deserve it?”

Interesting. Hugo has the best resting therapy face I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot of them. His bland, pleasant smile has always stayed firmly in place on the handful of occasions that I’ve shared the gorier details of my day. His instincts are spot on with this one, though. Based on what I saw in my skim of the report I swiped, Stiletto Guy’s a piece of shit who was begging for a pointy-toe pump to the face, and I’m dying to dig deeper into his background. But I can’t let my neighbor know that, so I rock back on my heels and press a scandalized hand to my chest.

“I mean, does anybody deserve to be attacked like that?” I widen my eyes to project nothing but law-abiding innocence.

For a second, I worry that I went too big, but Hugo backtracks right away.

“Of course not!” He smooths a hand over his hair, knocking his glasses down his nose. “I’ve done some of my best work helping patients channel their anger in nonviolent ways.”

Christ, where was this guy eighteen years ago when that might’ve helped me and Felicity? Oh, right. He was just a kid too, although for his sake, I hope he had a much different childhood.

Hugo’s brows pinch together as he scans my face. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

I angle myself away from his calm, steady gaze. “Um. I guess… there was a house fire on Saturday. It killed an eighty-eight-year-old woman.” I try to keep my voice steady.

“That’s awful.”

I exhale slowly and drop my gaze to the frayed left cuff of his sweater. “It was intentionally set.”

Oops. That came out in a shakier voice than I intended, and the way Hugo’s hand curls around his rolled-up mail tells me he noticed. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” Now I’m staring at his wrist, and my mind wanders to the dusting of brown hair that covers it. Is it as soft as it looks? And what’s he got hidden under that cardigan of his? Could be a pasty, sunken chest and bacne for days. Could be muscles on muscles on muscles.

It’s not the first time I’ve wondered this about my weird neighbor. In fact, shortly after I moved in, I considered exploring the unique benefits of our size difference, but that was before I’d been subjected to lethal doses of his soft eyes and gentle therapy-speak. Banging someone a foot taller than me is way less appealing if he’ll be stopping every two seconds to stare meaningfully into my eyes or make sure I’ve got enough potassium in my system to avoid muscle cramps. I try to live my life so I don’t nod off while the guy’s still inside me, thanks.

“Rue.” Hugo goes full Dr. Mohr, disrupting my attempt to think about anything other than the arson. “What does this case bring up for you?”

Terror and rage. I’m eleven again. I’m too weak and scared to do a goddamn thing as⁠—

No. Fuck this. Fuck him.

Ignoring the phantom throb in my right shoulder, I take a step away from the too-soft, too-perceptive man asking me to unpack the real reason I’m so bothered by Mary Glenn’s death.

“Weird.” My icy gaze sweeps across his lawn, then mine. “I don’t see any of your clients here right now, asking you to fix them.”

Hugo’s professionally neutral expression freezes for a beat before it dissolves into a lopsided smile. “There’s not a single thing about you that needs fixing, neighbor girl.”