Who could he tell, really? Heavy-lidded, he looked at the men sitting on the porch with him and Patricia in the lawn chair with her bare feet on the wooden railing, all of them deep in their cups. It would be so easy to say it right now, to halt the gossip and work talk with a confession: Y’all, I’m in trouble. But it seemed rude to burden them with the information, knowledge they’d have to reveal under oath if it ever came to that. Same with Greg Heglund, who was one of his best friends but also a federal agent. Darren’s uncle Clayton, a former criminal defense attorney and a constitutional law professor, would understand the impulse to shelter Mack, an elderly black man who’d been accused of murdering a racist piece of shit, but he would insist that Darren get an attorney, and Darren didn’t trust that that news wouldn’t get back to his lieutenant in Houston. How many cops did Darren know who assumed a man was guilty as sin just because he lawyered up, a constitutional right made to sound dirty, like an act of deceit?

He suddenly realized how lonely he was with no one to talk to about the mess he’d made, the secret he’d been carrying around for months, the fact that he didn’t know his mother well enough to predict what she might do in this situation. Lisa either, if he told her. They’d just gotten back to a good place. If she found out he’d put his freedom and their life together in jeopardy for Rutherford McMillan, would she understand or be through with him for good? He honestly didn’t know. Both of the women in his life were ciphers. Loose with whiskey, his mind lazed to another soul completely. Randie Winston. The woman whose late husband’s murder he’d solved in Lark back in October. He thought of the night they’d spent at that juke joint in Garrison, just over the county line from Lark, talking over bourbon and cheap vodka—his marriage, hers—how close he’d come to laying his whole life bare. He remembered Randie had almost taken his hand at the table. He still believed he could have confessed anything that night.

She’d reached out to him since then.