Chapter 4 #2
“Varies. Sometimes you get lucky the first night. Sometimes it’s a week.
” He shrugs. “People always come outside eventually. They get comfortable. They forget to be careful.” A beat.
“Your husband’s already not careful. Pulling into her driveway in his own car, a car with legislative plates—that’s a man who doesn’t think he’s being watched. ”
I look at the house. The living room curtains shift and I catch a flash of movement—her arm, his shoulder, shapes close enough to be touching but too blurred by fabric to be anything Nolan’s camera could turn into evidence.
“You can go home,” he says. “I’ll call you if I get anything tonight.”
“I’m staying.”
He doesn’t argue. We sit. Minutes pass. The neighborhood is quiet—sprinklers hissing somewhere, a television flickering blue in a window across the street.
Nolan adjusts his seat and rolls his shoulders, and my eyes track the movement before I can stop them—the way his jacket pulls across his back, the line of his neck, the way he holds himself like someone who’s comfortable being still for hours.
Bennett can’t sit still for five minutes without reaching for his phone.
“The dog in the photo on your desk,” I say. “Yours?”
“Was. Rico. Retired K-9. He passed last year.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He had a good run.” The corner of his mouth moves.
Not quite a smile, but close—the most warmth I’ve seen on his face since I walked into his office.
“Best partner I ever had. Smarter than me. Better instincts. Worse breath.” He shakes his head.
“Twelve years in the field together. He used to sleep on my feet.”
Something pulls in my chest. I’ve wanted a dog for as long as I can remember.
Growing up, my family always had one—a big dumb golden named Goldie who slept in my bed until I left for college.
I asked Bennett three times in the first five years of our marriage.
He doesn’t like dogs. They shed. They smell.
They’d scratch the hardwood. After the miscarriage I asked once more—something to take care of, something warm and alive in a house that felt so empty—and he said now isn’t the time, Claire and I never asked again.
And here’s this man talking about a dog who slept on his feet for twelve years with the closest thing to tenderness I’ve seen from anyone with a Y chromosome in longer than I want to count.
“You going to get another one?”
“Thinking about it. Hard to replace a dog like that.” He glances at me. “You have dogs?”
“No. My husband doesn’t—” I stop. The sentence tastes wrong. My husband doesn’t let me is what almost came out, and hearing it form in my mouth makes my skin prickle. “No. We don’t.”
Nolan looks at me for a second longer than the question warranted. Then he looks back at the house. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to.
The front door opens.
Nolan straightens. His hand finds the camera. “Bingo.”
Bennett steps onto the porch. Drink in hand.
Sleeves rolled. He’s laughing at something over his shoulder—loose, easy, the version of him I haven’t seen in years.
Then Megan follows him out. Barefoot. Tank top.
She’s carrying a glass of iced tea and Bennett’s already got a lowball of something dark. They move to the porch swing and sit.
Click.
Bennett stretches his arm along the back of the swing and Megan tucks herself into his side.
Her head settles against his shoulder. He pulls her closer and his fingers trace her arm—slow, idle, the absent touch of a man who’s done this a thousand times.
They’re not performing. Nobody is watching.
This is just them—the way they are when the doors are closed and I don’t exist.
Click. Click.
She says something and he laughs. Not the campaign laugh, not the rope-line laugh—a real one, low and loose, the kind I used to be able to pull out of him before everything went wrong.
He tilts his head down and presses his lips to her hair.
She curls closer. The swing rocks. The pendant catches the porch light every time it moves—a tiny flash, there and gone, there and gone, like a lighthouse signal across the dark.
My baby’s birthstone. Swinging on a porch swing against another woman’s chest while my husband holds her the way he hasn’t held me in years.
Click.
Nolan’s camera hasn’t stopped. He’s silent beside me, braced and still.
Megan lifts her head from Bennett’s shoulder.
She sets her tea on the railing and turns toward him and her hand goes to his collar—one button, then another, spreading the fabric apart.
Her palm flattens against his bare chest. Bennett sets his glass down and cups her face with both hands and kisses her.
Not a careful kiss. Not a quick one. He pulls her into his lap on the swing and her fingers grab his belt and his mouth moves to her neck and she tilts her head back and laughs—breathy, delighted, the sound carrying down the block and into the SUV where I’m sitting with my fists clenched in my lap.
An open porch. A residential street. Any neighbor could glance out a window and see a state representative with his tongue on a woman who isn’t his wife.
The man who tells me which blue dress photographs better is grinding against someone on a porch swing like he’s never heard the word consequence in his life.
Click. Click. Click.
She touches the pendant while he kisses her neck.
Her thumb brushes the stone—casual, absent, the way you touch something you’ve worn so long you’ve forgotten it’s there.
My baby’s birthstone. The month our child was supposed to be born.
She’s playing with it while my husband’s mouth is on her skin.
Click.
They untangle. He picks up his glass. She picks up her tea. They go back inside, his hand on her lower back—guiding her through the door, steering her, the same way he steers me at fundraisers. The door closes.
The SUV is quiet. My breathing is the loudest thing in it—ragged, too fast. I press my fists into my thighs and focus on my knuckles until the rest of me stops shaking.
Nolan lowers the camera. Sets it on the console. His hands move to the steering wheel and his knuckles go white.
“She was wearing it,” I say.
“I know.” His voice has dropped. Gone rough. “I saw.”
He read the drive. He’s seen the texts—blue topaz, reminded me of your eyes. He knows what that stone actually is. What it cost. Whose grief paid for it. And he just watched her fiddle with it while Bennett had his hands all over her.
“I’ve worked hundreds of cases.” He’s looking straight ahead. His forearms are rigid, the tendons pulled tight. “I’ve seen a lot of bad shit. A lot of men who don’t deserve what they have.” He stops. His jaw works. “This is different. Worse.”
The anger in his face isn’t performed. It isn’t calibrated.
It just hit him—he heard the story in his office and it pissed him off and now he’s seen it, the necklace on her throat, the porch swing, the way Bennett held her and kissed her hair and laughed with his whole chest, and his anger went from professional to personal in the space of a shutter click.
Nobody has been angry for me in a long time. Not like that. Not without being asked.
“Go home,” he says. Quieter now. “I’ve got what I need for tonight. I’ll have a full package in a few days.”
I reach for the door handle and my arm passes close to his. Close enough to feel warmth coming off his skin. My hand stops.
He turns his head. Looks at me. The glow from the monitors catches the scar through his eyebrow and his eyes hold mine and the moment stretches one beat past professional. Then two.
“Go home, Claire.”
I go.
The house is dark when I get there. Bennett’s side of the bed is cold.
I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling and my body is still humming with something that has nothing to do with the porch or the necklace or the photographs.
Nolan’s hands on the steering wheel. The way his face softened when he talked about his dog.
The two beats of eye contact that weren’t about the case.
I push it down.
It doesn’t stay.