I stared at his number, my chest thick with emotions that seemed disproportionate to whatever this thing was that Adam and I were doing. When had I turned into a teenage girl sitting by her phone waiting for an invitation to the prom? Because this welter of feeling churning in my chest definitely seemed like a regression into my adolescence, to the overpowering loneliness I’d felt when I believed I must be the only queer boy in the world. In this scenario, Adam stood in for all the straight boys on whom I nursed fierce but covert crushes. Only, unlike those boys, he had reciprocated. But reciprocated what? That was the nagging question. What did any of this mean to him? I could hear Larry’s voice—“Wrong question. The question is what does it mean to you?” More than just sex and that was the problem. When I had looked into Adam’s eyes as I fucked him and saw the trust, the tenderness, the mirroring back of my own face, I started to fall in love with him. But afterwards, when he’d slapped me on the butt gleefully, as if I’d scored the winning run in a baseball game, I realized Adam was not falling in love with me. This was sport to him, no-strings-attached fun. I’d felt as lonely as I had with those high school crushes, as filled with the words I was afraid to speak. I knew I had to speak them to someone if not Adam himself. Larry, for instance, but Larry would have advised me to end it with Adam and that was advice I wasn’t ready to hear. I slipped his phone number back into my wallet and went off to distract myself with work.

I retrieved the Ryan file from my carry-on and spread it out on the kitchen table. It took a couple of minutes of reading the same paragraph over and over before I could set aside thoughts of Adam and focus. When I did, intriguing questions began to form themselves: Was Bill Ryan’s death something other than an accident? Did Nick kill him? If so, why would he choose such a bizarre and dangerous method? What was his motive?