He shot me a wink, lips turned up into a grin. “Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it because there won’t be an encore performance.”

“Good,” I replied. “I got my fix, and it looks like Franky did, too. What a dick. An extremely unhelpful dick.”

“I was hoping for some solid answers. But maybe if it is him, this is enough to get him to stop.”

I shook my head, something about this still not clicking for me. I just couldn’t see a motive, besides the fact that maybe he still hated me for making him confront his sexuality? Was he punishing me for it, or was there something else we were missing? “And what if he was telling the truth about lending his car out?”

Jake huffed out a breath. “That’s excuse 101. An easy lie for him to say without much of a way for us to dispute it. Especially if he doesn’t want to tell us who he lent his car to. I think he was saying that just to get us off his trail.”

I slowed to a stop at a red light. We were now in a more expensive part of the neighborhood, where the homes were further off from the road and circled by tall fences and pristine landscaping. There were political signs on most of their front lawns, making it clear that it was also a primarily liberal neighborhood, which actually wasn’t rare for a city like Atlanta.

“We’re going to have to look at the tapes again,” I said. “There has to be a way to figure out who was driving. We can CSI that shit.”

“We can certainly try to,” Jake said, keeping his spirits up.

A thought struck me, one that had been teetering on the edge of my focus since we’d started to drive away from Franky’s house. “Wait, hold up… when we were leaving, did Susan say my name?”

Jake took a moment to think about that. He nodded, confirming my suspicion. “I think so, yeah. Why?”

“I’ve never met her before. How does she know who I am?”

He shrugged. “Did we use our names when we introduced ourselves? I can’t remember.”

“No, I don’t think we did.”

“Maybe she heard Franky saying it. She was probably eavesdropping by the door the second it shut.”

“Maybe…” I tried forcing the puzzle pieces together, trying to make sense of all this. Franky didn’t seem guilty, but his reaction wasn’t exactly helping prove his innocence. He clearly still wanted to stay in the closet, and maybe that was feeding some kind of hate-filled monster inside him? It could explain why he was lashing out at me, suddenly fixated on where I was and who I was with.