“It’s because of whoever made it.”
I looked down into my soup to keep from looking at him. I could feel my cheeks doing the thing again. I was going to need to have a serious talk with my face about the amount of work it was doing this week.
“I saw Hannah at Mystery Night, by the way,” I said, mostly because I needed a neutral topic and partly because I’d actually been meaning to ask. “I didn’t get a chance to say hi properly. She looks exactly the same as she did in school.”
Something in his face softened, but only for a second. It was there, and then it wasn’t, tucked carefully back behind whatever he used to keep things tucked away.
“She’s good,” he said. “Still out at the Falls.”
“She was always so nice to me. She was such a sweetheart.”
“She still is. You two should catch up.”
I waited, just a little, to see if he’d say more. He didn’t. He took a slow sip of his tea, his eyes on the mug instead of on me, and I had the distinct sense that I’d walked up to the edge of something without meaning to.
“And your parents?” I asked, carefully. “Are they still out there too?”
“Yeah. Same house.”
“That’s nice.”
“Mm.”
It wasn’t ano.It wasn’t ayeseither. It was a one-syllable answer that told me, gently but clearly, that I had found a door I was not being invited through. I’d spent enough of my life being the quiet one in rooms full of louder people to recognize what was happening. He wasn’t shutting me out. He was just telling me, in the only way he knew how, that there was nothing here for me to pick up right now. So I didn’t.
“Hannah asked about you too,” he said after a moment. He’d set his spoon down and was leaning back slightly in his chair, more relaxed than he’d been a minute ago, and the subject change was smooth enough that I almost didn’t catch the small exhale underneath it. “After Mystery Night. Said she’d forgotten how funny you were.”
I let him have the pivot. “I wasn’t funny in school.”
“Yeah, you were.” He said it simply, like it was just a fact he happened to know. “You just didn’t know it.”
“Jasper,” I said his name and then stopped, because I didn’t have anything to follow it with. The truth was, I didn’t know what to do when he said things like that—things that were so plain and clearly meant, things that bypassed whatever deflection I’d been reaching for and just sat there waiting for me to catch up. I looked down at my bowl. He had a way of stealing my thoughts right out of my head and leaving me standing in the empty space where they’d been.
“I’m not teasing you,” he said, quieter. “You were funny and cute, and you didn’t know it. You’re still both of those things.”
I took a long, slow sip of my tea and kept my eyes on the table and did not say anything at all, because anything I said was going to come out wrong or too honest or both.
He stirred his spoon once in his bowl. Twice. The kitchen was quiet around us—just the small sounds of the apartment, the cats somewhere in the other room, the faint tick of the radiator doing its thing. I watched his hand on the spoon without meaning to.
Then, in the same almost-offhand voice. “I’ve been thinking about taking a job, actually.”
I looked up. Something in his expression was careful in a way it hadn’t been a moment ago. “What kind of job?”
“Guy I served with runs a private investigation firm. He’s been asking me to do odd jobs for a while.” He said it evenly, hiseyes on his bowl, then up at me. Just watching to see what I’d do with it.
The words moved through me and settled somewhere low and uncomfortable. I kept my face as neutral as I could manage, which probably wasn’t as neutral as I wanted it to be. “A PI job?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Here?”
“Yes and no.” I felt the whole shape of what was coming. “There’d be travel.”
“Oh.”
I said it quietly and looked back down at my tea, and I hoped very much thatohwas not as transparent as it felt, because what was happening behind it was considerably more thanoh.He said he was staying in Honeybrook Hollow. But bartending in a small town after years away was not something that would make him happy, no matter what he said. I’d known that. I just hadn’t thought about it with specificity until this exact moment, sitting at my own kitchen table with my tea going cold, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“Oh,” I said again, because apparently that was all I had.
