Chapter 12
Asher
The trellis was not built for a man my size.
I find out while swinging a leg over the balcony rail, easing my weight onto the top of it, the side yard a story below me and the strip of lawn running off toward the gate she told me to use.
The cedar is sun-bleached and clear of any vines, anchored to the side wall with brackets that look like they were screwed in during a different presidency.
The first rung gives under my foot with a sound like a knuckle cracking.
I freeze, waiting for it to let go entirely and drop me into Audrey's flowerbed in a stripper-cop costume.
It holds. Of course it does. She told me it would, and she's right about most things.
I keep going down.
The navy shirt is still on me. The plastic star is still clipped crooked to my chest, catching the afternoon light every time I move and winking at the entire neighborhood.
My hat is on her nightstand. There wasn't time.
I think about it the way you think something's going to come back and bite you in the ass later.
And then I make myself stop thinking about the hat, because Nora is somewhere on the other side of that wall, and I still have a story of lattice to survive.
I get one more rung down. Two.
That's when the top gives.
I hear the bracket tear out of the siding before I feel it, a flat metallic shriek up by the balcony, and then the whole top of the trellis comes off the wall with me on it.
My stomach drops. I ride it down a foot, maybe less, a sick lurching slide with nothing under me, and then a lower bracket catches and the loose section swings in and slaps the side of the house.
The thump goes off like a starter pistol in the quiet.
Shit.
I feel it more than hear it, the whole panel booming once against the vinyl, traveling up through the wood and into my hands. Loud enough to carry.
And somewhere inside that house, two sisters heard it.
I don't move. I'm hanging off a half-detached trellis a few feet off the ground, both fists locked around cedar. I hold my breath against the side of her house, waiting to find out if that one sound just ended everything.
I count to ten.
Nothing.
I get my feet under me, lower the rest of the way, and drop the last stretch into the mulch, knees bent, landing soft.
Then I take the loose panel and press it gently back into the brackets it tore from, easing it flush against the wall and praying it stays put long enough to stop being a problem. It stays.
I snatch my things off the grass that I threw down earlier, balling my normal clothes in one hand and hooking my shoes over two fingers.
I step into the jeans right there against the fence, hauling them up over the ridiculous tear-away shorts because there's no time to deal with them, and I shove my feet into the shoes without untying them.
Then I go low along the fence the way she told me, around the side, toward the gate.
The latch, when I reach it, sticks exactly as she said it would.
I lift again. Hard. And it gives.
I shut the gate behind me with a click. Step out onto the front walk like a man who lives here, like a man who has every reason in the world to be coming around the side of this particular house at this particular hour.
"Officer?"
Fuck.
I go still.
Across the street, behind a white picket fence with its own little locked gate, there's a porch.
On the porch, there's a rocking chair. In the rocking chair there's a woman who has to be eighty in a quilted housecoat the color of a robin's egg with a cloud of white hair set in careful curls like she's expecting company.
She's looking right at me, both hands folded in her lap.
Rocking, slow and steady, like she's been there a while.
"Officer," she says again, warmer this time, delighted. She lifts one hand off her lap and waves it, just the fingers. "You're here early."
For half a second, I do the thing I always do. I read her. It's automatic, the way I've read every room I've walked into since I was seven years old. Posture, dress, eyes, the angle of the face —the thing the body is telling me before the mouth catches up.
And I get nothing.
The read comes back blank.
She's pleased to see me. She's certain she knows me.
There's not a flicker of confusion anywhere on her, and that's the part that doesn't land right.
Because there should be. A stranger in a police costume coming around the Sullivan house in the middle of the afternoon should buy me something. A question. A frown. Anything.
She just rocks and beams at me like I'm exactly who she was waiting for.
"Afternoon, ma'am," I call, and I lift a hand. Friendly. Easy. The voice I use on grandmothers at charity events, the one that's gotten me out of more than it's gotten me into.
"Tell your mother I've still got her casserole dish," she says.
"I'll do that."
"She knows the one."
"She sure does."
It satisfies her. She settles back into the chair, hands returning to her lap, eyes drifting out toward the street like I've already become part of the scenery, and I take that as my exit.
I check the street for cars or neighbors—empty—and I walk.
A man who runs is a man with something to hide.
I walk down the front of the house and across the street to the car parked in the shade of the overgrown maple, dead on the line between two houses so it belongs to neither.
I get the door open. Get in. Sit there.
Across the street, her house sits. The white siding, the gray roof, the upstairs window where minutes ago she had her fingers in my hair and a sound coming out of her that I'm going to be hearing for a week. The trellis I almost killed. The flowerbed. The hat I left behind.
I look down at myself.
There's mulch on one knee of my jeans, over a pair of tear-away stripper shorts. My heart is hammering like I sprinted, even though I didn't, even though I walked.
And the thought lands, clear and unwelcome, the way the good ones always do.
I'm too old for this.
Not the climbing. I can climb. I can still do most things my body could do at twenty-five—that's literally my job. I mean the rest of it. Sneaking out before anyone notices, going down the side of a house because the woman I'm seeing can't let me out the front door.
Pretending this isn't something real.
I start the car. I don't move yet.
I unclip the badge from my chest and drop it into the cupholder. It lands face up, silver plastic catching the light, and I look at it for a second longer than it deserves.
There's a version of this I used to want.
The no-strings-attached version. The one where the whole appeal was that nobody had to mean anything and nobody had to know.
I built a reputation on it. I was good at it.
I was, by any honest accounting, the best in the city at being the thing a woman could enjoy and never have to explain.
This doesn't feel like that.
This feels like I just kissed her at the corner of the mouth because I will always make time for her, even when there is no time.
And now I'm sitting in a car across the street picking mulch off my knee, and the part of me that's supposed to be relieved to be out clean isn't relieved.
It's already turned around. It's already back in that room. With her.
I pull out. I drive.
The whole hour down the highway, one thought keeps returning. I want more than this. I'm not even sure when it stopped being enough.
I want to take her out to dinner. I want to wrap my arm around her in a room with other people and not have her go rigid. I want more than stolen nights and shaded afternoons where she's already exhausted and dealt with the migraine all day. Alone.
I don't say it out loud. There's no one in the car to say it to.
But I think it the whole way home, and it's still sitting there when Harlow comes up out of the lake haze and I pull into the garage under my building.