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“Just coffee, thanks. I ate earlier.”

“Suit yourself.” She sauntered away toward the kitchen.

Josiah watched her go before turning back to me. “I don’t want to spend the whole time talking about the case. I asked you here because I wanted to speak to you properly, without a crime scene between us, or a dozen people waiting for me to give them instructions.”

I wrapped both hands around my cup, grateful for its warmth. “Alright.”

“I know we talked last night, and I know I said a lot that you probably weren’t ready to hear. I’m not expecting you to have sorted through any of it by this morning. I just thought we might be able to start by talking about ordinary things, if you’re willing.”

“Ordinary things,” I repeated.

“Your books, for instance. Your parents. What you’ve been doing all these years.” He gave a rueful little smile. “I realize I missed a lot.”

“You did.”

“I know.”

There was no defensiveness in his voice, no attempt to explain away the years or make the distance seem smaller than it was. That made it harder to be angry with him in the straightforward way I’d always imagined I would be if we ever sat down and talked about what had happened.

I took another sip of coffee and decided to start with something that felt relatively safe.

“You know I write cozy mysteries now?”

“I do.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I suppose my mother told you?”

He blinked, then laughed softly. “She told my mother, who in turn told me, actually. After that, I looked you up myself. I found your author page, read the descriptions, looked at the covers, and went through some of the reviews.”

I stared at him. “You read my reviews?”

“Some of them.”

“Why?”

He glanced down at his hands. “Because I wanted to know how you were doing. I wanted to know whether you were happy with what you were writing, whether the books were selling, whether you’d found something you loved doing. I couldn’t ask you, so I looked for what I could find.”

The honesty in that answer left me momentarily speechless. I’d spent years wondering whether I’d crossed his mind at all, whether he’d ever thought about the life we might have had together, and whether the boy who’d once promised he’d always be there for me had forgotten me as thoroughly as he’d left me behind. I hadn’t expected to learn that he’d been quietly watching my career from a distance.

“Sometimes?” I asked, remembering the word he’d used.

He looked up, and I saw a flicker of amusement beneath his embarrassment. “More than sometimes.”

I shook my head, unable to decide whether I wanted to laugh or reach across the table and shake him. “You could have sent me an email. You could have left a comment on your website - well, my website. You could have written a review under a fake name, for all I know.”

“I considered all of those things.”

“And?”

“And every time I thought about doing it, I realized that I’d be opening a door I’d spent years telling myself I had no right to open. I’d hurt you, Max. I knew that. I couldn’t pretend a message about a book would somehow make it alright.”

“No, it wouldn’t have made it alright.” I stared into my coffee. “But at least I would have known you were thinking about me.”

“I should have told you. I should have done a great many things differently.”

I pressed my lips together. It was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain the neat little box in which I’d stored my anger for all those years. I wasn’t ready to put it away, but his willingness to acknowledge what he’d done was making it harder to pretend there was nothing else to the story.

“So, the books,” I said, shifting the conversation before I lost my nerve. “You know I write cozy mysteries, but do you know what that actually involves?”