“With only one good arm?” Sam asked.

“Don’t worry about it.”

The front door swung open. Sam looked up and was startled to see Nick. “What’re you doing here?”

“May I have a word with you?” He gestured to the porch.

She looked closer, and this time she saw anger. Uh oh. What now? “Sure.” She got up and reached for her coat. To the others she said, “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Outside, Nick vibrated with tension as he paced the length of the porch.

Her stomach took a nasty nosedive. “What’s up?”

He turned to her, hands on his hips, clearly furious. “Were you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?” she asked, even though she suspected. How had he heard?

Running a hand through his hair in frustration, he said, “I thought we were past this shit, Sam! I thought we were past the point where we kept stuff from each other.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“When?” The single word reverberated through the quiet morning. “When were you going to tell me?”

“You’ve been so upset,” she stammered. “About John and Julian, what happened to Cruz, and then the thing with Reese. There just wasn’t a good time.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. We were together all last night, after you’d been suspended for hooking up with me, and you didn’t think I needed to know that?”

“Can you keep it down?” she whispered. “The people in there work for me.”

“I don’t care who’s listening! How do you think it made me feel to have my chief of staff tell me that my girlfriend, or whatever you are, was suspended from her job because of me? How do you think that felt, Samantha?”

“I’m sorry.” She silently cursed Gonzo and Christina and Stahl. Goddamned Stahl. This was all his fault. “I just wanted to make it go away without letting it touch us. I was trying to avoid this very scene.”

“If you’d have told me about it when it first happened, there might not have been a scene.” He took a deep rattling breath, clearly trying to control the impulse to beat the crap out of something—most likely her. “I want to know how this happened. I want every detail, and I want it right now.”

So she told him—about receiving the summons from Stahl to the hearing the day before to the phone call from Conklin. She left nothing out.

“This happened on your first day as lieutenant? That was before Julian was killed.”