“You really all healed up?” Ray said, his blue eyes examining me.

His concern for my physical health seemed genuine. Also spontaneous, as if he hadn’t thought to ask before now. Not last night, not at Café Francesca, not in Wonder Valley.

“I guess I’m ‘healed up,’” I said, unsettled. “Why?”

“You’ve got this expression now.”

I stared at him quizzically.

“I don’t know how to explain it.” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Like parts of you are tensed to fight.”

My ribs felt tight. “I’m fine,” I muttered.

“Thank God,” said a voice behind us, and then a chair pulled back and the detective slumped down beside us. This morning, she looked like yet another person. She was wearing another pressed pastel suit, but her eyes were wild, her hair mussed. “I can’t deal with another . . .” She paused, absorbing the posh coffee-scented air. “I need the rest of this morning to be crisis-free,” she said in a smoother, more professional tone. “Now that we’re all here . . .” She focused harder on me and gaped. “Jesus. Did you freaking jog here?”

“I walked,” I said.

“You’re burning up,” she said. “I’m getting you an ice water.”

She bounded up from her chair and stood in the coffee line, smoothing her own hair and casting suspicious glances back at me.

I shrugged, then stripped off my jacket, keeping my face blank. But the air-conditioned room stung my bare arms and shoulders; the black tank top I wore was silky and thin, and I hadn’t expected to be undressing down to it, especially not in front of Ray. He had the good manners to look elsewhere. I understood Detective Ruiz’s reaction: Why would I take a stupid walk and ruin a look that had cost me more than a grand? To feel young and free? To insist I wasn’t caged by this city? Neither was true. It was Brenae. I’d wanted to distract myself from my corrosive anger at her case. I hadn’t succeeded.

“Hey.” Ray leaned in. I smelled coffee and, beneath it, the scent of his skin and hair, which was dry and sweet, almost straw-like. “Two things. One, you are not the reason Alicia’s spazzing out now. Two, I am as interested in Steve Goetz as I am in my left toenail. Okay?”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“It’s true,” he said.

“I mean about the toenail,” I said, and wished I hadn’t because something had been shifting in his face and I’d caught a glimpse of the same fear that I’d seen on the night in Wonder Valley. But now it abruptly vanished.

“What?” he said.

“A left toenail isn’t a thing.”

“Not to a literalist Yankee, no,” he said.

“Literalism isn’t regional,” I said.