Larkin crossed his legs, folded his hands into his lap, and said in a clipped tone, “Four years.”

“It’s a work-in-progress that never ends, hmm?”

That’s enough bonding, Larkin thought. “The crabapple,” he prompted.

“Right, right.” Mable turned her attention to the computer. “That was the one near Shake Shack?”

“Yes.”

Mable clicked the mouse a few times. “What was it you needed to know?”

“When was it planted.”

She blew out a breath, shook her head, then swiveled in the chair and rocked her way toward the filing cabinets. “It’s a pretty old tree, as far as urban parks go. I don’t think that info is on the computer.” Mable yanked open a bottom drawer and began to sift through hanging folders.

The phone on her desktop rang.

“It certainly wasn’t Old Stumpy in age,” Mable was mumbling. “Remember him? I still get weepy.”

The phone kept ringing.

Mable shoved the drawer closed and yanked open a second. “It’s so silly—crying over a tree stump.”

The stink of the ashtray, the incessant ringing, the office that looked about to cave in on itself—the pandemonium of competing stimuli reached critical far quicker than Larkin anticipated. He lurched to his feet, spun around the chair, opened the office door, and stepped into the hallway. He grabbed the stairwell banister in both hands, closed his eyes, and took a few shallow breaths.

Doyle’s smoke-smooth voice said something to Mable that Larkin didn’t allow himself to decipher, and then the door quietly clicked shut and he joined Larkin. “Are you all right?”

Larkin nodded.

“It was a rhetorical question.”

“My answer was also rhetorical.”

“Okay.” Doyle let a handful of seconds pass before he asked, “Can I get you—?”

“No,” Larkin snapped. “I need a moment of quiet. That’s all.” He looked at Doyle. The other detective’s brows knitted together, but he said nothing further and returned to the office, announcing in an easygoing, everyone’s-best-friend tone that Larkin was taking a phone call.

Larkin closed his eyes again. He took a breath, counted, released it. His palms were sweaty against the banister, fingers aching from the white-knuckle grip. March 30 was not a good day. Perhaps even a bad day, Larkin considered. There were already too many associations—too many negative memories to now eat away at him every year, every spring, every March 30. The crack of thunder, the salty tear tracks, the insults and fights, the stink of Marlboros…. Larkin’s breathing escalated, pinpricks of cold heat spread across his chest like he was about to start dry heaving. He groped in his pocket, retrieved his phone, gripped it so tight that the plastic case protested. He pulled Dr. Myers up in his contacts—