He stared into my eyes for a long time, and I could see him soften. The old Chris, the one who wasn’t angry about what had happened to him. He was still in there. The relief nearly buckled me.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go. But if anything looks like it’s going to get stupid, we’re out of there. Or at least I am.”

I let out a breath and smiled. “Thank you. And you know me. How could anything get stupid?”

“It’s because I know you that I know things likely will.” He hit the unlock button on his key fob. “Get in.”

FORTUNATELY, THE DRIVE to Pear Magic was relatively short. But the traffic was awful, and the sun baked in on us, leaving a hot stripe across my legs. He had donned his sunglasses, which was how I was used to seeing him. Cane free, sunglasses in place, anger softened by yellow. It was almost as if the hit-and-run had never happened.

Hit-and-run. Why had those words come to me in eggplant?

Albany eggplant.

I turned down the radio—muting the stupid talk station that he was always listening to. “Does Albany mean anything to you?”

He glanced in my direction. “No. Should it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that this actress is from Albany, and when I read that, it made me . . . well, I just sort of have a feeling Albany is important to us somehow.”

“A feeling.”

I nodded. “I can’t quite place it. But there’s some sort of connection between Albany and the guy who hit . . .”

I trailed off. My mind spiraled back and back and back to where I’d seen a similar eggplant color. On a computer screen. In Chris’s office. The guy who hit him. A name that I couldn’t connect because it had come to me in an unusual color. Albany. Eggplant.

Only not Albany. Something similar. Albania or Albano. Or . . .

“Abana,” I said, incredulous excitement coursing through me.

“Excuse me?”

“Heriberto Abana. That’s who you were searching for before you got hit. I was in your office and I got bored and started to look around. You had been looking for this guy. Heriberto Abana. Albany. Shit. I fucking knew it.”

“Heriberto Abana,” he repeated, trying to keep his eye on the road while also looking at me.

“Yeah.”

He scratched his neck, thinking, then shook his head. Frustration came off him in pillowy green waves. “It’s like the name sounds familiar, but I don’t know why. What was I looking for?”

“Beats me,” I said. “You wouldn’t tell me. You said it was none of my business and you were all into some personal case. Like, it wasn’t assigned to you officially or anything. Do you think . . . he could be the one who hit you?”