Chapter 5: Nothing While You're Someone's Husband

I walked down the block and knocked on the pickup's window.

Jasper rolled it down.

"You're watching my parents' house," I said.

"I'm watching hers," he said. "Preston's people moved her in there last night. She's not safe at her own place, apparently."

"Because of you."

"That's the story."

I stood on the curb with a dead phone and no money.

"I have no cards," I said. "I have no key. I have one friend, and she works nights."

"I have a shop with a couch in the back room," he said. "And a phone charger."

"That's what a stalker would say."

"It is," he said. "So don't get in. Take the card and call me from somewhere else."

I got in.

He drove to Red Hook without talking.

The shop was a corrugated garage by the water with a half-stripped sailboat hanging on a lift.

It smelled of fiberglass and coffee.

He plugged my phone in beside a vise and put a mug of coffee in my hand.

Then he took a first-aid kit off a shelf and held it up.

"Your dressing is soaked through," he said.

I put my arm out on the workbench.

He unwrapped it with careful, scarred fingers, and I watched his face while he looked at the cut.

"Greta did good work," he said.

"How do you know her name?"

"You said it on the phone, on the dock." He cleaned the edge with saline. "I listen."

"That's not a comforting thing to say."

"It wasn't meant to be," he said. "It was meant to be true."

"Tell me why you were at that wedding," I said.

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