“I have a little situation here that I have to resolve.” If I was alive after it was resolved . . . but I wasn’t going to imagine that. I tried to think of a palatable excuse, and of course, I did have one. “My sister-in-law just died,” I told Remy. “Can I call you when I’m not so busy with the details of . . .” I couldn’t think of a way to wrap up that sentence. “I promise it’ll be soon. If you don’t have a day off, maybe Kristen could bring him?” Kristen was Remy’s girlfriend.

“Well, that’s part of the problem,” Remy said, and he sounded tired but also a little amused. “Hunter told Kristen that he knew she didn’t really like him, and that she should stop thinking about his daddy without any clothes on.”

I drew a deep breath, tried not to laugh, didn’t manage it. “I am sorry,” I said. “How did Kristen handle that?”

“She started crying. Then she told me she loved me but my kid was a freak, and she left.”

“Worst possible scenario,” I said. “Ah . . . do you think she’ll tell other people?”

“Don’t see why she wouldn’t.”

This sounded depressingly familiar: shades of my painful childhood. “Remy, I’m sorry,” I said. Remy had seemed like a nice guy on our brief acquaintance, and I had been able to see he was devoted to his son. “If it makes you feel any better, I survived that somehow.”

“But did your parents?” There was a trace of a smile in his voice, to his credit.

“No,” I said. “However, it didn’t have anything to do with me. They got caught by a flash flood when they were driving home one night. It was pouring rain, visibility was terrible, the water was black like the road, and they just drove down onto the bridge and got swept away.” Something buzzed in my brain, some kind of signal that this thought was significant.

“I’m sorry, I was just joking,” Remy was saying in a shocked voice.

“No, no problem. Just one of those things,” I said, the way you do when you don’t want the other person to fuss about your feelings.