Chapter 9: Served

Thane's apartment had one lamp on, a lot of books and a guest room with a made bed.

Bernie had refused to leave her house, so a patrol car sat outside it, and her neighbor, a retired cop, sat on her porch with a thermos.

"He'll have to get past me and my rolling pin and the man next door," she had told me on the phone.

"Bernie, he sent a picture."

"Then he'll have a very nice picture of a retired cop, too."

I could not sleep.

At two in the morning I went into the kitchen in a borrowed T-shirt and found Thane already there, standing at the counter in his socks.

He had a first aid kit open next to the kettle.

"Your hand," he said. "You haven't changed it since Wednesday."

I sat on a stool and held it out.

He peeled the old bandage off, and the cut had closed to a thin pink line.

He pressed a fresh strip over it, and his fingers moved slowly across my palm to smooth the edges.

His hands were not quite steady.

"You're shaking," I said.

"It's cold in here."

It was not cold.

I looked at his hand holding mine and let myself notice the thing I had spent the week telling myself I was imagining.

He was not letting go, and I was not asking him to.

I stood up.

I was close enough to feel the heat coming off his chest through his shirt.

"Thane."

"Nadine." He said it quietly, with his eyes on my mouth, and then he stepped back and put the counter between us.

"I can't," he said. "Not while the audit is open."

"Why?"

"Because it's your word against a stack of forged forms, and I'm the man who signed half of them."