Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
THREE MONTHS AGO
Rue
There’s comfort in the predictability of my life. Even the irritating bits.
Death. Taxes. Hives if I so much as breathe near shrimp. And Dr. Huge-o Bore waiting for me at the end of my workday.
On this particular Monday, I managed to avoid ending up on a slab at work, I paid my taxes months ago, and I steered clear of shellfish. But I start the Hugo count as soon as I turn onto our street.
“Four… three…”
That’s as far as I get before the door on the left side of the building swings open and the world’s most boring telehealth psychologist ambles out, proving yet again that he’s either got bat ears or an alert set for when I’m back in Wi-Fi range.
“He’s already outside, isn’t he?” Felicity asks through my AirPods, amused as always by my daily welcome-home party.
“Of course he is.”
Hugo’s wave as I pull into our driveway is so enthusiastic that he almost trips down the front steps.
Not great when he’s clutching enormous gardening shears.
I hold my breath until his sensible loafers are on the sidewalk next to his precious rosebushes before I return his greeting, although I drop my polite smile once I’m out of sight inside my single-car garage.
“Why that cardigan?” I mutter, throwing my car into park and yanking my Medical Examiner’s Office lanyard from around my neck. “Every day, rain or shine, winter or summer, it’s that hideous cardigan and for what reason?”
“I am yet again begging you to take a pic so I can experience the cable-knit horrors for myself,” Fi says.
“I’m not going to sneak photos of my neighbor. He’s not Bigfoot, and I’m not a creep.” That, and some weirdly protective part of me doesn’t want to offer up this piece of Hugo for Felicity’s amusement.
Instead of belaboring the point, I sigh and turn off my car. “I’d better go.”
“You could just stay on the phone with me,” Fi offers.
“No way.” My vehement response surprises both of us, so I hastily add, “The last time I tried that, he looked so sad. It felt like I was kicking a needy, socially awkward puppy.”
“Your funeral,” my sister says with a shrug so big I can hear it. “Enjoy your time with the virgin next door.”
“Talking to the virgin next door isn’t going to kill me.”
“It could bore your vagina to death.”
“At least death by virgin would be quick,” I point out. “Awkward, but quick.”
“Do you think the cardigan is an emotional condom or a metaphorical hymen?” Fi muses. “Ohh, do you think he wears it during se—”
“Okay, love you! Call you later! Bye!” I say over her increasingly disturbing speculations. Then I suck in a deep breath, step out of my car, and brace myself for the full Dr. Bore experience.
When I finally emerge from my garage, Hugo sets his shears on the bottom step and gives me a salute that’s so hopelessly nerdy, I fear I’ll spontaneously combust in secondhand embarrassment.
He is, and there’s simply no other way to put it, cringe.
Even if the cool kids aren’t saying it anymore, the word fits the man in front of me like a worn pair of Crocs.
“Howdy, neighbor girl!”
“Hi, Hugo,” I say with a quick wave. I stayed late to finish up some paperwork after the end of my shift, but there’s still enough light in the early September sky to see the corner of his mouth tip up as he adjusts his glasses.
When we first met, I wondered if he was constantly messing with those thick frames to get a better look at me, but I quickly learned it’s just one of his nervous tics.
“Congrats on surviving your day.” He falls into step beside me as I walk toward our mailboxes at the foot of the driveway. “Were you working hard—”
“—or hardly working,” I reply. “Ha.” He trots this line out at least once a week.
“So?” He crosses his arms and leans against the brick tower housing our mailboxes. “Which was it?”
Let’s see… I got called to investigate an accidental drowning and then a possible overdose. I took possession of some stolen police files that might point me to my next target, and I inhaled a PB&J at my desk in between.
“For me? Hardly working,” I say instead, reaching into my box and emerging with junk mail, junk mail, and more junk mail.
“For you?” He tilts his head a millimeter to the right. “But not everyone else?”
Dammit. I forgot how quickly my big, goofy, supersmart neighbor picks up on little details. And he’s doing it while standing, like, right there.
“You take up too much space.” I scowl up at the man looming over me.
He responds by shifting an inch closer. “How are you not used to it yet?” His tone is so unexpectedly playful that it almost makes me forget his deadly dull conversation and embarrassing earnestness.
Almost.
“I promise you, I’ll never get used to it.”
But I drop my scowl and do something I’ve rarely done in a year and a half of living next to Hugo: I linger.
Hell, I even mimic his crossed-arms mailbox lean as best as I can using all five feet, four inches of me.
I’m sure to anyone driving past, it looks like Frodo Baggins trying to have a conversation with Thanos.
If that same passing motorist wanted to risk losing a vital organ to the knife in my front pocket, they might also suggest I was sticking around to unpack some things with the shrink next door. Which I’m not. I’m just sharing my day with my neighbor, like I sometimes do.
Once I’m situated, I tip my head way, way up to meet his gaze, and I find him looking down at me with an expression I’ve never seen on his face before. It’s sharp and penetrating, almost hungry, and my stomach flips at the thought of my hapless, sexless, cringey neighbor ravenous for something.
I quickly look away, not so much flustered by Hugo as by the idea that he’d be able to fluster me at all.
But when I look back, that’s dorky Dr. Mohr grinning at me once again.
There’s no knowing glint in his eyes, just his awful, hunched-up posture that I privately attribute to some kind of spinal condition.
Annoyed at myself for projecting dark and mysterious onto white-bread wholesomeness, I shake my head and try to recall what we were talking about before my imagination went on a walkabout.
“Sorry, you were asking about my day,” I say, mentally sifting through my cases for the least hair-raising ones. “Things were pretty calm at my office, but it was a wild weekend for the police. They had people out there using all kinds of found objects as weapons.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
A smile lights up his face, and I yet again ponder the waste of potential that is Hugo.
In theory, all the individual elements for attractiveness exist in my neighbor.
Thick black hair, yes, but he smashes it down with too much gel.
Broad shoulders, sure, but they’re constantly covered in lumpy knitwear. Absurdly square jaw…
Okay, that one’s good no matter what.
I clear my throat. “Broken bottles, pool cues, that kind of thing. No fatalities, so nobody from my office got called in. But apparently, one woman squirted ketchup in her date’s face, then beat him with her shoe. Practically took out his eye with a spike heel.”
“Wow,” he says, adjusting his glasses. Truly, it’s a crime against humanity that this jaw was gifted to a man with the fashion sense of a colorblind eighteenth-century Quaker.
I catch a flash of speculation on his face when he asks, “Did Stiletto Guy deserve it?”
Interesting. Hugo has the best resting therapy face I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen a lot of them.
His bland, pleasant smile has always stayed firmly in place on the handful of occasions that I’ve shared the gorier details of my day.
His instincts are spot on with this one, though.
Based on what I saw in my skim of the report I swiped, Stiletto Guy’s a piece of shit who was begging for a pointy-toe pump to the face, and I’m dying to dig deeper into his background.
But I can’t let my neighbor know that, so I rock back on my heels and press a scandalized hand to my chest.
“I mean, does anybody deserve to be attacked like that?” I widen my eyes to project nothing but law-abiding innocence.
For a second, I worry that I went too big, but Hugo backtracks right away.
“Of course not!” He smooths a hand over his hair, knocking his glasses down his nose. “I’ve done some of my best work helping patients channel their anger in nonviolent ways.”
Christ, where was this guy eighteen years ago when that might’ve helped me and Felicity? Oh, right. He was just a kid too, although for his sake, I hope he had a much different childhood.
Hugo’s brows pinch together as he scans my face. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”
I angle myself away from his calm, steady gaze. “Um. I guess… there was a house fire on Saturday. It killed an eighty-eight-year-old woman.” I try to keep my voice steady.
“That’s awful.”
I exhale slowly and drop my gaze to the frayed left cuff of his sweater. “It was intentionally set.”
Oops. That came out in a shakier voice than I intended, and the way Hugo’s hand curls around his rolled-up mail tells me he noticed. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” Now I’m staring at his wrist, and my mind wanders to the dusting of brown hair that covers it. Is it as soft as it looks? And what’s he got hidden under that cardigan of his? Could be a pasty, sunken chest and bacne for days. Could be muscles on muscles on muscles.
It’s not the first time I’ve wondered this about my weird neighbor.
In fact, shortly after I moved in, I considered exploring the unique benefits of our size difference, but that was before I’d been subjected to lethal doses of his soft eyes and gentle therapy-speak.
Banging someone a foot taller than me is way less appealing if he’ll be stopping every two seconds to stare meaningfully into my eyes or make sure I’ve got enough potassium in my system to avoid muscle cramps.
I try to live my life so I don’t nod off while the guy’s still inside me, thanks.
“Rue.” Hugo goes full Dr. Mohr, disrupting my attempt to think about anything other than the arson. “What does this case bring up for you?”
Terror and rage. I’m eleven again. I’m too weak and scared to do a goddamn thing as—
No. Fuck this. Fuck him.
Ignoring the phantom throb in my right shoulder, I take a step away from the too-soft, too-perceptive man asking me to unpack the real reason I’m so bothered by Mary Glenn’s death.
“Weird.” My icy gaze sweeps across his lawn, then mine. “I don’t see any of your clients here right now, asking you to fix them.”
Hugo’s professionally neutral expression freezes for a beat before it dissolves into a lopsided smile. “There’s not a single thing about you that needs fixing, neighbor girl.”
“Oh, baby, you have no idea.”
My unintentional confession slides out with a laugh, and the next thing I know, my hand is resting on the wrist I’d been contemplating. It’s warm and solid. Strong. I bet I’d barely be able to wrap my fingers all the way around it.
Slowly, it occurs to me that I’m standing in the driveway with a death grip on my neighbor’s wrist, and I snatch my hand back in mild horror.
Hugo and I are not the touching kind of neighbors, and he reminds me of exactly why that is when he spins away to plant his hands on his hips and squint up at the sky.
“Sun’s going down,” he says in that nasally, goody-goody register he sometimes slips into when we talk. “We should get inside before you get chilly.”
I cross my arms over my midsection as though I am, in fact, cold. Better he thinks that than the truth: it would be better for me to pull another all-nighter cleaning blood out of Fi’s little hatchback than to continue contemplating the girth of his wrists.
Not that it matters. Hugo’s too busy frowning at his phone to notice my little “I’m cold!” show.
“In a hurry?” I ask, curious despite myself. He’s never once acted like he had any place to be other than boring me to death.
“Huh?” He looks up, his expression so blank it’s like he forgot where he was for a second. “No. Sorry.” He slides the phone back into his pocket with a grin. “I’ve got an evening session tonight. Just keeping an eye on the time.”
“Don’t be late on my account,” I say. This poor guy, stuck inside all day doing remote therapy session after remote therapy session with no signs of an actual personality or social life.
I’ve never seen him host a dinner party or have friends over to watch a game, and that goes double for a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a polycule or whatever he’s into.
I spent my first few weeks in the duplex building a case file on my new landlord, but he showed no signs of life whatsoever beyond the occasional snatches of music or, like, PBS documentaries that permeate our shared wall. Case closed. Hugo’s perfectly harmless.
The wind’s picked up while we’ve been chatting, and a particularly strong gust has Hugo hunching even more than usual. “Brrr,” he says, flashing me another crooked smile as he moves to block the breeze with his big body.
Yeah, he definitely watches World War II documentaries on PBS. Black-and-white ones.
We say a hasty good night, but I feel his eyes on me as I hurry into my garage and hit the button to close the door, stopping only to grab my bag from the passenger seat.
Once I’m inside, I walk through each room on the main floor, checking that the windows are still securely fastened, the triple locks on the doors are in place, and the fire extinguisher’s under the kitchen sink.
I grab a sparkling water and a pack of frosted circus animal cookies, tossing another pack on the counter in case insomnia hits tonight and I need a three-a.m. can’t-sleep pity-party snack.
Then I head upstairs to finish my security routine.
Everything’s in its place, but as the final step, I sit down at the desk in my bedroom to review the feeds on my massively expensive and massively worth it home security system.
It’s the final confirmation that nobody came or went while I was gone, and only then do I feel comfortable changing into sweats and a hoodie to get to work.
But my mind won’t rest as I pop a pink-frosted camel into my mouth.
It’s not just my horror over Mary’s fate that’s dogging me.
It’s that tiny spark of life I thought I saw in Hugo’s eyes.
It tugged at my gut, and now that I’ve touched his skin and felt the muscles and bone underneath, I can’t shake the thought of pulling that brief flash of awareness back to the surface.
That, or stripping him out of that cardigan, stuffing it into his mouth so he can’t fucking talk, and riding him until I can’t talk either.
Girl, get a grip. You do not want to fuck the bore next door.
I’m just in a weird headspace tonight. Once I purge these thoughts about my neighbor’s girthy wrists, I can get back to more productive things.
Like, for example, figuring out who burned down Mary Glenn’s house.
Then figuring out how to kill him.