“Yes. And in a twist of irony, I wanted to be a chef. I was accepted into culinary school upstate.”
“Really?”
Larkin nodded. “I started college a year late because I was in the hospital. I went into psychology instead. Added a criminology major shortly after.”
“Why?”
Larkin looked up, raising his eyebrows. “Why, what.”
“Why psychology?”
Larkin chewed on his words for a moment, then said, “I don’t think I can accurately describe the sensation of waking up andthinkingdifferently than you did the day before. It’s like you’re a stranger to yourself. And no matter how hard I tried to be who I was before… he was gone. My memory and thought process is so hyperanalytical now, that it made sense to pursue an education that would help me understand all of the details I was memorizing.” He shrugged, feeling a little self-conscious under Doyle’s gaze. “That’s all.”
A loud silence settled between them.
Larkin asked, “What.”
“I want to ask a question, but I’m concerned it’ll prompt an association.”
“About Patrick.”
“Yes.”
Larkin shook his head, looked at his bowl, and said very quietly, “You can ask.”
“Did they catch the person who did it?”
“No.”
Doyle reached across the table, wrapped his hand briefly around Larkin’s left wrist, and gave it a squeeze. “I’m sorry.”
“Tell me something about yourself. That I don’t know yet.”
Doyle let go, leaned back in his chair. “I’m not that interesting.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Doyle smiled, his face—his entire body—lighting up. “I kept the very first voicemail you left me. I listen to it, sometimes. When I need to hear your voice. ‘This is Detective Everett Larkin, Cold Case Squad. The time is 9:07.’”
Larkin tilted his head and asked, so curiously, so sincerely, “Why?”
Doyle set his fork down. He scratched at his stubble a moment. “Remember when you told me how it felt incredible to meet someone who understood your love language, even if it wasn’t their own?”
“Of course.”
“In the past, most guys have equated my need for touch with sex. Don’t get me wrong, I love sex, but for me, touch isn’t only about skin-on-skin. It’s about the way someone smells. The way they sound. The way their smile makes me feel. When I listen to that voicemail, I feel… at home.Youfeel like home. And I think, if someone can make me that comfortable, they must understand my language pretty well too.”
Larkin felt as if he was standing outside himself, watching a sort of belly-twisting vertigo effect take place—the kitchen, the apartment, the city shrinking out of view—the moment, the second, zooming in on him, closer and closer untilbam. The beat that’d been building in Larkin’s chest since Monday, March 30 at 9:44 a.m., dropped suddenly, and his spirit was flung free from his body—the sense of tipping backward in his chair, falling through the floor, the Earth, shooting through the cosmos before being blown apart into millions of pieces of stardust, scattered to the farthest reaches of the universe where time didn’t exist and mourning wasn’t a concept and there was nothing to latch onto but only the most naked of truths.
“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Could it be that in seeking himself, in pushing aside the veil, Larkin glimpsed a treasure that looked a little bit like calluses and cardamon and whiskey and pyrite? And that he wasn’t a nobody—because on Wednesday, April 1, at 4:56 p.m., Doyle had kissed him and Larkin hadn’t been gray, but was instead a rainbow. His treasure made him feel like asomebody. His treasure made him feel like this was a tried-and-true partnership.
In art and investigation.
In life and death.
In love.
