I feel awkward hugging him, this half-grown giant, and remember anyway he didn’t like it, so instead I just nudge him with my elbow.

“You’ve been doing some growing,” I say.

He shrugs, but he looks pleased. “Football. What are you doing here?” he says.

“I came to watch you play,” I say, and when a smile steals over his face I really wish it were true. “Good game.”

“You shoulda been here for the real season,” he says. Then his face darkens. “I haven’t been playing as much. Not since…” He sucks back whatever he was going to say.

“You got in trouble, right? With Walter Gallagher?”

“You heard about that?” He looks at me sideways, and then, reading my face, says, “You talked to my mom?”

“I called her, yeah,” I say. Monty shuffles his feet. “What happened?”

For a long minute, he just stares down at the space between his ragged sneakers, suddenly morphing back into a kid. “Last Halloween me and some friends snuck onto Gallagher’s.” He looks up at me through his eyelashes—dark, long for a boy’s. “My friend Hayes wanted to steal one of Gallagher’s four-wheelers. We weren’t really gonna take one,” Monty hurries to explain. “It was just talk. We were just pretending we were going to. You know what I mean?” When I nod, he seems to relax. “Anyway, it was kind of a tradition to mess with Gallagher on Halloween, we weren’t even the first ones to do it.”

“And you got caught,” I say.

Monty nods miserably. “He let the dogs on us. Hayes almost got his leg taken off. But we were just messing around.”

“And you were pissed,” I say. He nods. “You said some stuff about Gallagher, threatened to get even.”

He nods again, so droopy with obvious misery he looks like a cartoon bloodhound. “I wasn’t serious, though,” he says.

“Did you start that fire at Gallagher’s?” I ask him, as gently as I can.

“No,” he says immediately. “Hell no.” And I believe him. “Sheriff Kahn’s just got it in for me,” Monty says, on a roll now, huffing with anger. “He’s never liked me, ever since sixth grade he caught me spray painting this old wall behind the plant. No one even goes back there.”

I take a deep breath. “Look, Monty, I have to ask you something. I need you to be honest, okay?” He nods. Despite the fact that he’s six foot three, minimum, and broad as a plank, his face is sweet as a baby’s. “What happened between you and Tatum Klauss?”

“Nothing happened,” he says. He barely gets the words out. “How’d you hear about Tatum?”

I don’t answer, and I don’t let the thread drop, either. One of my law professors once told me you could defend any liar on the planet, so long as he didn’t lie to you. “Did you threaten to hurt her?”

“I would never hurt Tatum,” he says quickly, and he winces, as though the idea is painful.