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“Yeah.”

He listens, his attention dropping to the pavement between us. “When?” Another pause. His jaw shifts. “No, I get it.” He drags a hand through his hair, leaving the already-disordered strands considerably worse off. For some reason, that really does it for me. “Yeah. Okay. I can come.”

The call ends before he seems entirely prepared for it. Baryn lowers the phone but doesn’t put it away, staring at the dark screen for several seconds as though it might offer additional instructions now that the person on the other end has stopped providing them.

I wait.

He exhales through his nose and finally looks at me. Whatever excitement I saw when the call came through is still there, but now it has company.

“That was a, uh…” He shifts his weight. “A contact I have at the Oakhaven detention center.”

I narrow my eyes.

“You know the guy they originally arrested for moving the bones?”

“Nole?” I ask.

“Yeah. They moved him two hours away because Stillwater doesn't have the security infrastructure to hold a felony tampering suspect.”

Don’t I know it?

I still haven’t caught up to what’s happening.

"My, uhm…” He trails off.

“Contact?”

I realize now that I misidentified the source of his hesitation. It wasn’t the call. It’s having to explain it to me.

He clears his throat. “Yes. My contact. He’s a debt-ridden corrections officer with expensive habits and a very low opinion of the facility’s overall integrity. He’s on the schedule to work in Nole’s dorm tonight, and he’s the one who’s letting me in the back door for twenty minutes of…interviewing.”

I watch him, utterly dumbfounded. "And that costs?"

"Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.” He bats his eyelashes at me.

In return, I flip him off. “Despite the fact you’ve been keeping things from me, I find myself inclined to come with.”

He pockets his phone but makes no move toward the inn. Instead, he leans back against the car beside me, content to keep loitering in the parking lot for no defensible reason.

"Nole will talk to me,” I insist.

I don't point out that he’s already mastered the art of the bribe, or that Nole will fold for him without my help. He doesn’t need me. But the way he’s looking at me—like he’d already decided I was going before I ever asked—makes my stomach turn inside out.

I’m just as desperate to go as I am terrified of the way he makes me feel.

“I want you to come with me,” he says. “Not because I need your help. I just want you there.”

“You say that now. Wait until Nole refuses to answer a question until you correctly identify which gas-station hot dog best represents his aura.”

The absurdity gives me somewhere safe to put the implication of what Baryn just said.

Unfortunately, that is also more or less exactly what we’re walking into.

I linger outside the bathroom door, one hand braced flat against the wood, the other hovering in mid-air. I shouldn’t knock again. I know the rules of social conduct, even if I usually find them inefficient.

I knock anyway.

“Tamsin?” I try for calm, but land somewhere closer to restrained panic. “Do you need⁠—”