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Joel’s smile was shy. “Thank you, Ann. I appreciate that.”
Joel’s parents had died when he was in college and he’d missed having someone care about him like Sam’s parents did.
“I’ll take your dishes,” Bill said. “You go on home and sleep. We’ll make sure Sam and Siggy get home safely, too.”
“It’s three floors up, Dad,” Sam said dryly. “I think we can make it on our own.”
“We’re going with you,” Ann said in a tone that brooked no argument. “And if anyone stares or whispers, we will give them what for, believe you me.”
Oh, Sam believed it. Normally he bristled when they helicopter-parented. He was thirty-five years old, dammit. But today...
Today he’d let them do it.
They saw Joel off, another plate of lasagna in his hands, then set off for Sam’s apartment. Luckily there was no one either staring or whispering.
But his apartment...
“Fuck,” Sam murmured when they’d entered.
“I’d normally tell you to watch your language,” his mom said, “but... fuck.”
There was black powder on the walls and nearly all the surfaces, left over from whoever had dusted for fingerprints. Drawers were opened and his dishes sat in haphazard stacks on his kitchen counter.
His bedroom was in a similar state, the bedding torn off and the mattress up against a wall. The gauzy bottom of his box spring was gone, cut away to reveal the interior. His clothes were on the floor, the dresser drawers lying on top of them.
The contents of his closet were on the floor as well. It was going to cost a fortune to have his suits dry-cleaned.
Feeling like a zombie, he marched around the piles of clothing to the wooden box on top of his suits. Leaning over, he picked it up and lifted the lid. Then shuddered out a breath of relief.
“They’re still here,” he murmured to himself. His childhood treasures were intact—his track medals, the Boy Scout sashes covered with the merit badges he’d earned on his way to Eagle Scout.
He found his class ring and... hers. Marley’s. But he didn’t truly relax until he’d found the simple silver band beneath their senior prom photo. He’d given her a promise ring that night, and she’d cried when he’d slid it on her finger. They were going to get engaged when they were twenty-one. Her father had made him promise that he’d wait that long.
Sam had wanted her buried with the simple ring on her finger, but her parents had put it in his hand, closing his fist around it. Keep it, they’d said.
Remember her, they’d said.
As if he could ever forget. She’d been seventeen and the love of his young life. They’d been so sure that they’d have forever. But some things were not to be.
“All there?” Sam’s father asked gruffly.
“Yeah. The photo’s a little bent, but it’s all here.” He was surprised, honestly. He figured they’d have taken the box as evidence, given they’d thought he’d murdered a teenage girl.
Maybe it had been the photo of the two of them together, so very young, that had prompted CSU to leave the box behind. He might never know.
He certainly had no intention of asking Detective McKittrick, no matter how much she’d smiled at him. She’d thought him capable of murder.
She didn’t know you. She still doesn’t.
And she never would. Now that he’d come down from the euphoria of being released, he was shoving the events of the past twelve hours to the back of his mind.
Because that was so healthy. But he didn’t care. Not right now.
He tucked the box under his arm, backed out of his bedroom, and headed into the bathroom—where he found another mess. All the toiletries were in the sink, along with the over-the-counter medications he’d had in his medicine cabinet. On top of the pile was an unopened box of condoms that had been in the cabinet for four long years.
That wasn’t embarrassing at all. He turned from the sink and stopped cold. There was a crusty residue all over his bathroom wall. It covered the wall next to the shower and continued to the tiled wall of the shower itself.
“What is that?” his mother demanded, only her head sticking in through the door, the rest of her still out in the hall.
