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My fingers pause over the keys. It’s not an accusation, just one of those little openings Clint leaves behind without noticing. A joke with a splinter in it.

A few weeks ago, I would have let it pass. Or logged off. Or retreated into the safer silence of watching him perform for everyone else.

Bentley84: I’ll have you know my car is extremely modest.

Clint reads it and snorts.

HotnReddy: sure, bentley.

The name on-screen feels different when he uses it now. Still fake. Still better than being Paul.

Bentley makes him laugh.

Bentley is also a coward.

Clint sets the lotion aside and wipes the grease from his hands. The public room keeps pulling at him, but he lets it wait another second.

HotnReddy: So what about you?

I stare at the message.

Bentley84: Me?

HotnReddy: Yeah, you. Did you get that stuff worked out?

That stuff.

I told him something one night when the public chat was slow, and he seemed tired. Not the truth, but as close as I could get without revealing the bigger lie.

Legal stuff. A complicated separation. I had used the word divorce because it was close enough to grief to hide inside and far enough from death to avoid naming it.

Divorce. As if Renny were across town, making life difficult. As if I could call and ask him why he left me in a sinking boat with no oar and a Dixie cup.

My throat tightens.

I should log off. That is the correct answer to almost every question.

I should log off because Clint has a legal claim against the estate. Because every message makes the cruelty larger. Because if he finds out who I am, he’ll be humiliated. Furious at the deception. And, worse, he’ll be right.

Or he’ll never find out. That possibility may be the worst.

One day, he’ll stop showing up. He’ll become a story I can never tell anyone, and I will have spent these nights taking something from him—a little laughter, a little ease—that he didn’t know he was giving.

I look at the screen. He’s talking to the public room now, deflecting some demand with a roll of his eyes.

I like talking to him.

For some reason I do not want to examine closely, I like it more than I like most things lately. I like his quickness. The way kindness seems to irritate him before he accepts it. I like that he remembers what I tell him, though I tell him almost nothing true.

The barrier of the screen gives me permission to be a version of myself that would never survive daylight.

I type slowly.

Bentley84: Not really.

Three dots appear almost immediately.

HotnReddy: Lawyers still being lawyers?