There was a girl…at the bar…a girl Richard had his eye on…a girl Richard found the nerve to talk to…a girl who got so creeped out by Charles that she came right out and told Richard she didn’t want to be around his friend. How Richard had flamed inside, how he shoved her back against a wall.

Why? Because she was cruel enough to say what he himself would not? Or was it perhaps because she threatened his duty to Charles. His role. His lot.

The two stumbled home and when he woke, Richard found another note:

Wonderful night. Thank you, friend.

And now, by some providence, by unseen fingers knitting impossible collages in the sky, Charles had gotten himself a girlfriend. Scary Charles. The guy who had blown it for him (or brought him inexplicably to blow it for himself) so many times. Charles had met someone. Incredible. Unreal. Vindicating. It didn’t matter that Richard didn’t see or hear from Charles in the four months between hearing about her and getting the strange hushed call from Charles tonight. It didn’t matter at all. Richard held it like a precious baby bird. Charles having a girlfriend meant Charles was that much closer to having met a second friend.

And perhaps, Richard mused, his work here was done.

8

Okay, Richard thought, still looking into the eyes of that Sherman topiary. Let’s go back. Just a little this time. Hardly any at all. To tonight. Earlier tonight. When you got in the car and told me you might have done something very very wrong. How I had no doubt that you had. How I had never doubted this day was coming, always, en route…

9

“What is it, Charles?”

The two had been sitting long enough for the rain on the windshield to become a second pane of glass, a layer of distortion, of cover. Richard was nervous.

Confessing something is different from telling someone something, Richard thought. Remember when he told you how he let that hamster rot? How he didn’t want the hamster his father got him and how he put it in the basement with a blanket over the cage and walked away? How he went about his business upstairs for days while that animal suffered then starved then rotted away a floor below? If this is any worse than that—

“Don’t worry, Richard,” Charles said. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

Richard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Again he imagined those long-limbed, slow-moving Goblin Police in their sickly gray uniforms.

Come out! We have reason to believe there is a man about to confess a crime in there! It’s our job to hear it, our job to document it, our job to—

But it was Richard’s job. And it always had been.

The rain came hard against the car.

And suddenly Richard understood that he wanted Charles to confess something. Something terrible. He’d stretched his soul so far for Charles, too far, and perhaps a crime would be closure after all.