The Takedown

Chapter 8

8

I never run with anyone else. Not anymore. Running is a solo endeavor. I don’t want to chat and jog. What do people even talk about when they’re running? Don’t they care that it slows them down?

The only person I ever ran with was my dad—around the cul-de-sac, down toward the beach. He’d push me because he knew I was fast, had a lot of drive in me, even at the end of a couple miles. Kiddo , he’d urge me on. Pick up the pace . He was a good dad when he wanted to be: kind of chaotic, messy haired, never managing to hold down seasonal work; but I still picture him running backward, belly-laughing on the beach, calling me kiddo, kiddo, kiddo . Sometimes, when I’m sprinting at 5 a.m. by the river in DC, I can almost hear his footfall, catch a glimpse of his bearded face.

Calla didn’t run with us. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Calla run, unless it was in a mandatory gym session or after a frozen yogurt truck. She is more of a Pilates, cross-stitching type of person. But when Nick opens the door, Johnny isn’t far behind, saying that he’d like a run—and that Calla, babe, you should tag along. He doesn’t ask; he insists. There’s the faintest hint of a wince from Calla, who’d just put on her fluffy lounge socks, but she quickly spins it into an eager, conciliatory smile.

We depart as an awkward foursome, Johnny and Calla in the rear, Nick and I up ahead.

Nick’s a little chatterbox, isn’t he? I expect him to fill the silence, ruin the solitude. But his breath just streams out in a long puff of air. He keeps pace with me as we wind along the snow-plowed path, past the long-drained swimming pool and the gazebo. Our sneakers grind against the rock salt, our faces dig into the cold wind, and I wonder if someone like him sees my neighborhood the way that I do. The way that I am, right now. In the snow, near the holidays, you can’t beat it. This subdivision is seaside Maine meets a Netflix Christmas movie. Carrot-nosed snowmen wave at you from lawns. Wreaths wrap around picket fences, half held up by drifts of snow. There’s a manger scene by the frozen tennis courts, complete with plastic donkeys bending down to lick the face of Baby Jesus.

“So where is Nick taking you tonight?” Calla chirps behind us, breaking my no-talking-while-running rule as we curve onto the main road, toward the beach.

“Sorry, I told her about dinner.” Nick shrugs, back to sheepish, his feet pounding the pavement. When our shoulders jostle together, I remember those images from the Buffalo heist—bloodstains on the bank floor—and I want to hip-check Nick right off the sidewalk. “I thought she could give me some recommendations.”

“And?” I say, thinking that in a city like Stockholm, I’d know exactly where to suggest. Nick and I would sit in a corner booth at a just-dark-enough bar, with smooth leather seats and crystal glasses that clinked with our cheers . Everything would be precise, sharp, sexy. In Cape Hathaway, Maine, Nick could... bring me to Al’s Off-Season Lobster Shack. Or the grocery store.

“You know your Italian restaurant has a C-minus health rating?” Nick asks.

“Dishies!” Calla and I yell at the same time before I look back at her and whisper “Jinx.”

“That was it,” Nick says, laughing, like he has the right to insult a town relic. “Dishies. Where they serve no deep-dish pizza. Or pizza of any kind.”

“No pizza at an Italian restaurant?” Johnny asks, horrified. He has a borderline psychopathic running style; he barely swings his arms, stiff as the firewood Nick was chopping this morning. Nick, on the other hand, has good form. Hate to admit that. He keeps his face slack and his arms loosely crooked at his side.

Great style for sprinting away from a crime scene.

“Just surprise me,” I say, picking up the pace when we hit the near-beach motels. Pastel-colored buildings with long summer balconies whip past us. “As long as you don’t take me to the Moose Lodge.”

Nick barks out another laugh. “What is a Moose Lodge?”

“An institution!” Calla says, keeping up. It’s Johnny who’s slowing down.

A gust of wind cuts under my earmuffs. “A hundred bottles of hard whiskey,” I detail. “Moose Lodge bingo. Lots of taxidermy.”

“As fun as that sounds, I think we’ll give it a miss.” Nick tugs down his beanie again without breaking his stride, then throws me a look that I catch out of the corner of my eye. “I’m trying to impress you.”

Glad he is. Also wish he wouldn’t.

“Did I tell you that I had a visitor last night?” Nick asks. “Sweetie Pie is a bed hog.”

“What?” I ask, squinting.

“She actually crawled up into bed with you?” Calla asks, beaming.

I’m confused. Usually I trust Sweetie Pie’s judgment. “She never does that with strangers.”

“She hasn’t done that with me,” Johnny mumbles, like a sulky little boy pouting in the back of his mother’s minivan because we’ve forgotten his presence.

“I feel honored, then.” A warm smile spreads across Nick’s face, giving him those deep eye grooves again, and man, I’m getting tired of the nice guy shit. “I grew up with German shepherds. Lots of people were scared of them, but they were just big mushes... You know Sweetie Pie wags her tail in her sleep?”

“ Yes ,” I say, leading us closer to the beach, scanning for black ice on the pavement. Nick has found one of my only weaknesses, so I let myself be a tiny bit vulnerable. Calculatedly. “It kills me.”

“When I woke up,” he says, “all four of her paws were stamped into my back, and I was...” Still running, he scrunches his arms to his chest, demonstrating his predicament. Maybe she was trying to push him off. I revise my earlier statement about Sweetie Pie’s judgment. “Hanging on to the edge of the bed.”

“As long as Sweetie Pie was comfortable,” Calla says with a nod.

Nick chuckles. The first hint of a five o’clock shadow is starting to appear on his jawline. “Yeah, I didn’t move a muscle for about fifteen minutes, because she was still wagging her tail and I didn’t want to wake her up. Then I got a cramp. Had to wiggle a little. How long have you had her?”

“Since she was a puppy,” I say, then reluctantly offer the whole story as we run. Sweetie Pie was all roly-poly belly and fresh spots. Calla and I’d picked her out at the local shelter; she’d dug her snout through a bundle of shredded newspaper and had come up with little pieces sticking out between her ears. It was love at first bark. “We did one of those doggy DNA tests on her,” I finish, “just for fun. She’s a mastiff-terrier mix. Six percent German short-haired pointer. Two percent Chihuahua .” I end with the shock factor.

To his minor credit, Nick obliges me with the appropriate disbelief. “ No .”

Johnny doesn’t give two shits about Sweetie Pie’s DNA apparently. He’s preoccupied with trying to pass me on the sidewalk. Enough of me leading! He wants to be out ahead.

I cut him off at every damn turn and feel the silent rivalry welling up between us.

“I tried to run with her once,” I add, aggressively (but innocently!) blocking Johnny and pointing to the pavement, as if Sweetie Pie were loping alongside us. “I know pointers are huge runners. Sweetie Pie made it to the tennis courts, which is like a quarter of a mile, and then refused to move. The neighbors thought she was dead. She stiffened her legs in the air and everything. It was very convincing.”

Nick gives this a full grin, like he’s pulled off a particularly difficult heist, leaving no fingerprints, and once again, I’m confident that I’ve got him. Time to slip in a few questions about New Year’s Eve.

Increasing the pace even more, we hightail it down to the water, a mix of sand and dark pebbles beneath our feet. Long Sands Beach isn’t just deserted in the winter—it’s like the set from a postapocalyptic movie where nature has taken over and no more people remain. There’s something so violently beautiful about the surf crashing against the rocks. The sky is slate gray with approaching snow. Little puffs of white are already descending from the clouds, but the real storm has yet to come.

“Race you?” I ask Nick, already accelerating, because I think he’ll like this, the playful competition. And I need to get slightly ahead of Johnny, so that I can ask Nick a few questions in private.

Nick is less ferociously competitive than Johnny, but he’s down for the challenge. “If I can keep up,” he teases, throwing my words back at me. The length of his strides increases . Sweat beads on my chest, underneath the polar vortex of clothes, and we’re neck and neck until the first bathhouse, where Nick pulls ahead, stopping short by the edge of the water. His hands go to his knees, and he breathes heavily through his mouth. “Damn, Sydney. You’re fast.”

“You’re faster,” I say, just as breathless, palms on my hips. I walk it out. Walk it toward him. We’ve sprinted about a quarter of a mile, and Calla and Johnny are... Actually, I can’t even see them anymore with the fog.

“How often do you run?” I ask Nick.

“Just on the weekends. I’m more of a rower.” He pauses, massaging the pads of his hands, where the calluses have built up. “I try to wake up early and get out on the river before anyone’s up. Sounds stupid, but everything else just... floats away. It’s the closest thing I know to peace.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, I used to mountain bike, too. Way back when.”

My mind lingers on the peace comment, but I push the conversation along. “Did you have a crash or something?”

Nick examines me with a squinted gaze, still bent over from the run. There’s something so satisfying about recovering before him, about him wheezing long after I’ve stood up straight. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

I tap my chin. “Your scar here.”

“Ah. Yeah. Went straight over the handlebars.” He jerks his head toward the water, cold waves crashing. “That’s when I took up swimming. The water kind of healed me, and—well, swimming led to rowing.”

My brain sparks with a connection. I know how I can get him to talk about New Year’s Eve. “You couldn’t get me out of the water when I was a kid. Calla, either. But everyone’s a big swimmer around here. We even have one of those polar plunges for the New Year.”

Nick stands up straight, too, only half recovered from the sprint. “You ever done it?”

“Actually, no. Do you want to? Thinking about sticking around for New Year’s?”

Nick laughs. “If anything could entice me, Sydney, it would not be the opportunity to freeze my ass off.”

“Oh, come on. You’re Canadian. Canadians are immune to hypothermia.”

“That’s scientifically proven?”

I nod, checking for Johnny and Calla. They’re still behind the curtain of fog. “Can’t argue with science.” My feet shift in the sand toward Sidekick Nick. I need a better nickname for him. Something that fully captures his slipperiness. Tricky Nicky? “Really, though. Got any plans for New Year’s?”

Nick eyes me flirtatiously, the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth. “Are you asking me out?”

“Maybe,” I say, nudging him. My skin rebels at the contact, but I’m getting tunnel vision, eyes set on the prize. Any bit of intel he wants to let slip. “Are you working then?”

“Always am,” he says, peering out at the water. “I’ve never done a polar plunge, either.”

My gaze travels alongside his, over the icy waves, and the pieces slot together. How I can further this relationship fast . Yes, it means momentarily abandoning the New Year’s chat, but on the whole, it’ll be worth it.

I said I was all in for the mission. This is what all in looks like.

Gathering my resolve, I inhale and face Nick completely. “Here’s an idea...”

“Uh-oh,” he jokes.

Then, without any further hesitation, I unzip my jacket, shrugging it off onto the hard-packed sand. A question rises in Nick’s eyes, but I’m far from done. Crisscrossing my arms, I peel off my fleece hoodie, then my tank top, revealing the naked plane of my stomach and a thin cotton sports bra that hardly covers anything in the cold.

Seduction isn’t always about showing the most skin.

Sometimes it is.

Nick sweeps a tasteful gaze down my body, quickly, before returning to my eyes. “What are you...?” he says, leaving the question hanging in the frigid air. His Adam’s apple bobs. The way he’s looking at me has changed. This has just gone from a friendly, competitive run to something else entirely. I haven’t miscalculated; he likes the intense parts of me. Shouldn’t I play that up more? Be spontaneous. Surprise him.

And pray that we don’t get hypothermia.

Or, at least, pray that I don’t get hypothermia.

“Well?” I raise an eyebrow, thinking, Come on, take the bait .

Nick puffs out his lips but meets the challenge, pausing to peel off his own clothes. He does it carefully, slowly. “Guess it’s nothing you haven’t seen before,” he says. The naked parts of him hit the bare winter sun, goose bumps popping on his forearms. Our teeth barely chatter as we strip off our pants together, until we’re standing in our underwear on the deserted beach.

He’s a briefs guy. Calvin Klein. Black cotton.

Figures. It’s basic.

“On the count of three?” he asks, wind whipping against his skin. He has winter freckles. They pop in the sun. That slice of a scar on his stomach glistens, too, and I wonder who was on the other end of that scar. Who Nick might’ve hurt in return.

“We run in up to our shoulders, we run out,” I say over the sound of the surf. “One, two...”

“Three!”

Nick doesn’t waver. Neither do I. We dash into the surf, ice water splashing against our ankles—and yep, that is absolutely freezing. A prickling sensation consumes my calves, my thighs, waves crashing against my stomach, my shoulders, and Nick is two feet away, muttering something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like a prayer.

“Oh, I hate this,” he chokes out with a laugh.

“This may be the worst thing I’ve ever done!” I shout, mimicking him on purpose. Rigid waves crash against my neck, and we get the hell out of there, arriving like jellyfish onto the shore: wobbly, knees knocking together, breathless. I pretend that the extreme cold has knocked me sideways. “Who... whose idea was that again? Yours?”

“I think... yours.” Nick is taking deep, intentional breaths through a lazy grin. His lips are mildly chapped from the cold. “Here... there’s...” he chatters, leaning down to scoop up my clothes, and I take them with an equally shaky “thank you,” waiting for him to grab his own before leading him to the bathhouse. The building is shuttered in the winter, but there’s still an alcove by the shower station. A good windbreak.

Calla and Johnny are nowhere to be seen.

“You... okay...?” Nick asks, tugging on his pants in the alcove, and honestly, it’s hard to get words out when your lips are almost completely numb. I mutter something incoherent, struggling to slip my damp socks back on, and despite myself, let go of a full-body shudder. I’ve been in colder situations—on assignment, in Romania, last year—but obviously, Nick doesn’t know about Romania. Silly little lines of concern run across his forehead.

“Hey,” he says, shuffling toward me and rubbing his hands up and down my arms. What’s that supposed to do? I’m half naked here. Friction, his skin on my skin, isn’t enough. Those rough rower’s palms scrape down my arms.

“Let’s get your jacket on,” he says, gaze raking my face.

And there. There it is. The tiniest sliver of an opening.

I feel the relative warmth radiating off him.

And the trust. And the want.

Everything I don’t feel. Everything he should.

With slow, deliberate movement, my toes rise, and my lips press against his in a crash of ice and pretend lust. Is he surprised about the kiss? Good . Let me keep him on his toes. The timing is slightly off for a natural progression of this “relationship”—it doesn’t feel completely right—but this job is all about probability. Weighing up outcomes. We have days, not weeks, not months.

I’m taking the early chance.

Fisting the front of his fleece coat, I drag Nick even closer to me.

A breath shudders through him— excellent sign —and his fingertips reach up to trace my jawline. It’s a gentle touch, powdered sugar light. The kiss starts out gentle, too. A slow sweep of my mouth against his, capturing the fullness of his lips—and yes, I will concede that he is an objectively decent kisser. The energy between us shifts. This is no longer an innocent, mistletoe kiss. We aren’t at a Christmas party, surrounded by friends and family; no one could look at us right now and go awwwww . When Nick bites my bottom lip, it’s sensual and sharp. Almost like we’re fighting.

I want to bite him harder. So very, very hard.

But I’m thinking about what this version of Sydney would want. She might have the sudden urge to draw his hips flush against hers; it’s like Nick can read that Sydney’s mind. His fingers sink into my lower back, pulling me against him, and his tongue slips into my mouth. He tastes of candy cane scones and seawater.

“Sydney...” Nick rasps, straight into my mouth, and I answer with an unintelligible sound, wrapping one leg around his body as he presses my back against the cold concrete wall. I’m thinking clinically, methodically, even though his tongue is trying to make me forget this is a mission. Forget I’m doing this for a reason other than I desperately want to. His hips roll forward, and I match the movement, breathless, the heat in my belly traveling lower, lower...

Okay, that’s enough acting.

I drop my leg, unclasp my hands from behind his neck, and to Nick’s credit, he stops immediately. He listens to the movement of my body, taking a full step back.

A surprise to me. Didn’t think that any part of him was a gentleman.

“Sorry,” I say, clearing my throat.

“No, don’t apologize,” Nick says, a touch hoarse. He runs a hand over the back of his hair, which my fingers have just mussed through.

“That was—”

“Unexpected,” he volleys back. “And nice.” His throat bobs again. “You know, I really would take you out for New Year’s, if you wanted. Are you sticking around, or...?”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “I thought you had plans,” I say, coy, sidestepping his question to keep us on track.

Nick huffs out a sigh. “I do. Well, sort of. Vinny, you know, Johnny’s cousin? He was going to throw this big New Year’s Eve get-together, but things seem a bit up in the air now. With the surprise wedding. Everyone’s thinking about... moving things around.”

He’s said it oddly. Slowly. Like he’s contemplating a bigger event than the wedding.

Chills break out along the base of my neck, nothing to do with the polar plunge. Something’s occurred to me. A wedding would make a perfect alibi for a heist.

The Christmas presents. Johnny’s texts to Andre. Maybe that was code.

“Where is Johnny?” Nick says suddenly, uneasy, peeking his head out of the bathhouse, and I yank my jacket on. Say we should call them. Go look for them.

But all along, I’m wondering how far I can push Nick on the walk home.

—

Three minutes later, I have him pinned to the ground.

“Ugghhh,” Nick groans.

Palms to his jacket, I still his shoulders with the force of a combat medic. “Seriously, you need to stop moving.”

Nick grunts out an expletive, lying face-up on the frozen sidewalk. Turns out that he is a black ice detector. He’s just detected it with his feet. And his back. And his butt. Turns out, Johnny got a massive cramp near the boardwalk and made Calla turn for home; Nick and I were following their trail. We’d barely gotten past the beach motels before the ice sent Nick flying. “Man,” he says. “ Man , my ass hurts.”

Judging by his full-body wince, the pain is at least a six out of ten. I jump farther into triage mode, unpinning him for a hot second, pulling out my personal cell phone, and dialing Grandma Ruby. “I’ll have someone bring the car and we’ll get you back to the house, all right? Or to the hospital?”

“No, no hospitals.” His head tilts back and forth on the sidewalk.

“ Stop moving.” Can’t he follow simple directions? I extend a finger in front of his face as the phone rings. “Trace the path with your eyes. Good. That’s it... I’m not sure if you have a concussion, your pupils are responding, but we’ll still see if you need a doctor. I promise we will fix your ass.”

Nick chuckles dryly. “Don’t make me laugh, Syd.”

Syd? Since when am I “Syd”? That’s probably a good thing. A sign that he trusts me. Or that he does have a concussion and has forgotten my whole name. Either way, the nickname scrapes an angry path down my insides; this guy doesn’t get to know me. “On the bright side,” I try, “everyone loves a good holiday injury story.”

Nick winces, crow’s feet popping around his rich brown eyes. “Do they?”

“No. That’s really dark. Sorry.”

“If I have to sit on one of those tailbone donuts,” Nick says, “I think Christmas might become my least favorite holiday...”

Christmas. Holiday. It’s the perfect time for a heist, isn’t it? Even better than New Year’s. Much lower law enforcement staffing...

Has Johnny really moved the heist up to use his own wedding as an alibi?

The bastard.

On the second try, Grandma Ruby picks up the phone. She speeds through the streets in her Oldsmobile, helps me load a very stiff Nick into the back seat, and soon he’s stretched out on the living room couch, light from the Christmas tree dancing over his face.

“Really, it’s okay,” Nick says at everyone’s concerned looks, even though he is two shades paler than this morning. “I’m fine.”

“Well, you don’t look fine,” says Grandma Ruby, and I think I might get my bluntness from her. She’s Betty White sweet, but no one at the town council has ever accused her of holding her peace. “You’ve lost a bit of your razzle-dazzle.”

For Nick, it’s bad enough that he’s bruised (my guess is a rapidly purpling chain from his tailbone up his spine). What’s worse is we’re all crowded around him like he’s a dying man in a nineteenth-century painting. Sweetie Pie tip-taps over and licks one of Nick’s nostrils, which I can only assume is dog for Feel better soon . Or, You have something in your nostril.

“Are you sure we can’t drive you to urgent care?” I ask, gazing down at him, thinking, Welp , Nicholas, this might be karma for everything that you’ve done . There’s also, annoyingly, a flash of a moment where I remember the press of his lips on mine. The thought of his teeth scraping against me, of me scraping right back.

“Or the hospital?” Calla asks, biting her thumbnail next to Johnny. She’s still in her running gear. “You might’ve broken something.”

“Or have a concussion,” Johnny adds, tapping his own temple. Presumably he knows a lot about concussions. Having given them to other people.

A muscle in my neck twitches discreetly.

Nick shakes his head, black hair outlined against a reindeer cushion. There’s a bag of miniature frozen corn under his tailbone, carrots and peas supporting his spine. We will not be eating those later. “It’s really not that bad. I thought it was, but I already feel better. Don’t worry about me.”

On what seems like instinct, Grandma Ruby presses the back of her hand to Nick’s forehead, like she’s checking for a fever.

“I texted everybody,” Johnny says, pulling out his cell phone as evidence. “My messages are blowing up. Vinny wants to know if he should come over.”

“No,” Nick says firmly. “No, he doesn’t have to do that.”

“He doesn’t have to do anything.” Johnny tuts, dragging the attention to himself. “But we worry about you. You know we worry. Sal’s asked the same thing.”

“Well, the more, the merrier,” Grandma Ruby offers, removing her hand and gently patting Nick’s shoulder. “You’re a brave boy. Now, let’s give the guy some space.”

I do not give the guy some space.

When everyone else disperses into the rest of the house, I plunge down onto a footrest by the Christmas tree, wondering if my icy route on the walk home has briefly dented this mission along with Nick’s tailbone. Also, I’m not that cold; I don’t want to see anyone hurt, even if it’s someone thoroughly reproachable. “I owe you an apology.”

“Oh, for trying to kill me?” Nick bats back, equal amounts of strain and humor in his voice.

A laugh cracks out of me, unbidden. “How was I trying to kill you?”

Nick shifts the bag of butt corn and counts on his fingers. “Shower scare attempt, ice water plunge, ice road walk—”

“When you say it that way...” I did select a different route home to extend the journey. A windier path should’ve equaled more time for Nick to open up. I knew it was shadier, tree-lined; black ice was always a possibility. “I feel like I should point out, though, that if I am trying to kill you, I’m terrible at it.”

Nick huffs out a laugh before his face softens even more. “You know I’m just messing with you, right? No way is any of this your fault. But if you feel like making it up to me...”

Back to flirtatious, are we? That’s a partial relief. “Name your price.”

He points to the TV remote with noticeably stiff effort, but his eyes are jollier than his body suggests. “Watch something with me. Whatever you want.”

“Yeah?” I grab the remote. “I’m pretty sure that Grandma Ruby still has cable, so our options are probably going to be limited to the news and Hallmark Christmas movies.”

“Never seen one,” he says.

I blink at him, resettling uncomfortably into my role. “Nick, no .”

“That good? What am I missing?”

“You know, it’s all like: A twenty-eight-year-old widow who’s a well-known children’s author buys a dilapidated ski lodge in rural Vermont just before the holidays, but the lodge used to belong to the grumpiest grandson of some guy in town, and the grandson is bitter about the loss of his ancestral property, but at his core, all he wants is love . He and the author are thrust together by fate, building construction, and Christmas spirit.”

“Which movie are you describing?” Calla says, suddenly popping her head into the living room.

“Fake film,” I reply.

“ Darn ,” she says, leaving again.

I switch on the TV, start scrolling. “What’s your favorite movie?” I ask Nick.

He smirks. “This is where you judge me, right?”

“No judgment. Unless you say something like... I don’t know... Grease 2 .”

“See, I was going to go with Good Will Hunting , but thank you for reminding me that Grease 2 is, in fact, my favorite movie.” Nick points at the framed photo on the coffee table between us. “This is great, by the way.”

My stomach pinches, looking at our Christmas card photo from twelve years ago. Grandma Ruby does not have an eye for photography. Give her a choice of three excellent photos and one stinker, and she will—without fail—pick the one where Calla is sneezing, my eyes are closed, and Dad looks newly emerged from endoscopic surgery...

Dad . I skate right past his face. Past his salt-and-pepper hair and graying beard. Refuse to focus on any of it. He was wearing that shirt—that red flannel shirt—the day he got in his truck.

“Isn’t it?” I say, like the reminder hasn’t affected me at all. “We’re a photogenic bunch.”

“It’s nice,” Nick says.

“That’s your concussion speaking.”

“Don’t have a concussion. And honestly, even if I did, hospitals really aren’t my thing.”

I frown. “Germs?”

“Germs,” he concurs. “I’ve also spent way too much time in them. Anyway, the photo’s got character. That your dad?”

Goddamn it, Nick. Let it be. I flick through the channels, grinding out, “Yep.”

There’s just enough bite in my voice that I think he’ll shy away from the subject, but he just keeps pushing. “I always wanted a big family.”

A big family? I wouldn’t describe mine as particularly large, especially with Dad gone, but maybe it is, for Nick. Something in my chest pinpricks. What I say next is half strategy, half... just plain human. “I’m sorry about your grandma.”

A line forms across Nick’s forehead, and it’s abundantly clear what he’s thinking: Did I tell you that my grandma died?

“You just sounded like you were close, and you’re not with her at Christmas, and the hospital thing. Should I not have brought it up?”

“No, no, you’re good.” Nick clears his throat. “Thank you.”

I nod. “You’re welcome.”

Together, we flick through the channels, settling on a movie about a woman from California who inherits a Canadian cabin from her great-great-uncle, only to fall in love with the youngish cranky groundskeeper who (plot twist!) is all sunshine at heart. Also, there are bears. They attack midway through the film, and for a second, I think the story is about to go in a c ompletely different direction.

Nick doesn’t notice. His eyes are closed. His breath has slowed.

I leave him as he drifts peacefully to sleep.