He shifts. “Em, I still don’t know what I want. Besides you.”

She frowns. A well-turned phrase, a romantic notion, is not going to cut it with her this morning.

“Do anything. Take a job at GreenGirl. Anything. We could use the money.” She pulls on her boots and begins to lace them up. “Heroism doesn’t seem to come with a paycheck, unfortunately.”

My job is to be here with you. He doesn’t say it. He knows it will only annoy her.

Disaster, drama, life and death drew them together. Gave them a rare, special bond. Will ordinariness, the everyday, the mundane every couple faces, pull them apart?

Reality…intruding.

“GreenGirl,” she says—half kidding, half serious, checking her boots one last time in the open doorway, the building’s dingy hallway framed behind her. “While you try to figure it out, Zack. Anything, Zack. You think I love my job? You think anyone does?” Yet, before she closes the apartment door, giving him the bottom line, she says to reassure him, “See you later.”

22.

22.

He’s a kid, this Will Shale. And you’d say right off, based on his age and his smooth baby face, that this is probably his first time inside. But his ease in here, his familiarity, his swagger, indicate it’s not.

He’s wiry. Tatted up like a long-term con but several of the tats, Joey sees, are letters and numbers—formulas, weird equations, when Joey dares to take a closer look. Mean-eyed like a con but alert-looking, intelligent, and he seems, well, kind of amused. A little bit of college kid to him. College kid gone bad. Very bad.

At first, they tolerate each other silently, moving around each other warily. And when both sense there’s no physical danger from one another, they start to talk.

And soon, jail time turns a lot more interesting for Joey Richter.

It takes a while—shared irritation with the guards, complaints about the food, teasing about snoring, descriptions of the neighborhoods where each of them grew up—for Joey to get to the stage where it’s okay, enough time has passed, to pose that most basic jailhouse question: What do they got you for?

“Oh, they don’t got me,” Will replies confidently, bouncy, with a little smile. “They just think they got me…” He stretches a little. “It’s temporary.”

“For what?”

Shoulder shrug. “Bunch of stuff.” Looking at Joey with a bemused, suspended expression that says, I can explain it but I don’t know if I can trust you yet, like you don’t know if you can trust me.

Bunch of stuff? What could that mean? “Try me,” says Joey.

Another shrug. “Cybercrimes.”

Joey repeats the word blankly. “Cybercrimes.” Saying it in a way that reveals he doesn’t really understand what Will means.