Jagged-edged mint built a bridge between us. His confusion was obvious. He was searching for answers. He had only pieces of what happened—the ones told to him. Somehow he’d gotten the impression this was a true accident, maybe even his fault. Of course he had. Nobody else had been there but Arrigo Basile’s mother and me. I could tell them it looked like a purposeful hit all day long, but I had nothing to prove it, other than the fact that the driver hadn’t stopped. God knows what Arrigo’s mom would have told police. She had been half-crazed with fear, and had an entire family of criminal thugs to protect—including Arrigo himself.

And, damn it, I had been too busy rushing to Chris’s crumpled body to think about looking for a license plate. All I knew was it was a black Monte Carlo. Not like there weren’t a few zillion of those out there or anything.

“You didn’t walk in front of it,” I said. “They came out of nowhere. They hit you on purpose. And then they ran.”

He frowned, as he tried to take it all in. “Who?”

I deflated. “I was hoping you could tell me,” I said. “You were being really secretive about something. You wouldn’t let me in.”

Suspicion stretched between us in mints and ferns and lime sherbets. I worried that I’d sounded bitter about him not letting me in. How rich, given that I’d made it my life’s mission to let nobody—especially him—in. “Why were you there?” he asked. “Why were we together?”

“Oh God,” I breathed. “You really don’t remember anything.”

He shook his head, slowly at first, and then with more conviction. His forehead creased. “I’m trying. I remember being at your graduation. And then . . . pieces. You were in jail, right?”

“That’s what you remember, out of all this time? That I was in jail? Yeah. I was in jail. For a night. You got me out. We were looking for Rigo Basile, and we found him. You sh—” I stopped myself short. You shot Bill Hollis, I was about to say. But was that something you sprang on someone—that they’d killed somebody? Would he understand why without me retelling everything that had happened? It didn’t seem like it. And where did I start, anyway? With my arrest at the graduation party? With the day we busted into the Hollis warehouse? With my mom dying right next to me when I was eight? It all seemed to go together, to get scrambled into one long event. And I wasn’t sure how he would take it, or even if he could take it. “You should go home and get that beer,” I said instead. “You’ll remember more tomorrow, probably.”