Luke flashed back to that night, so much of it a drunken blur, but he had honed the memory of Lisa and Ramón talking to one another. He’d been her dealer for at least a year at that point, long enough for her to believe that whatever he—the emperor of the high—gave her would be of a certain quality, including a canary prototype.

I tried to fly. But it didn’t work.

“You took it that night?” Luke asked her. “At Uncle Lizard’s?”

Lisa looked at him through her sunken eyes. She shrugged, then nodded. “First,” she said again.

“I think,” Ramón said, “the prototype, together with the coke she’d already taken . . . it had an adverse effect—”

“No shit,” Luke growled. “Fucking genius.”

“I told her to take it easy.” Ramón closed his eyes and moaned. The left side of his jaw was twice the size of the right. Broken. No doubt about it. He talked through his teeth, like a ventriloquist. “She didn’t listen. She took too much.”

Luke looked at Lisa. This rang true. Her impatience and impetuousness had led to many arguments during their time together. She didn’t like to wait for anything.

“Why did you even bring it”—Luke turned back to Ramón—“if it wasn’t ready?”

“I’d turned her down on other occasions, with earlier batches.” Another runnel of blood crept from his hairline. “She was beginning to doubt it was real. I brought it to save face. She pushed me to try it.”

Again, remembering their intimate exchange, evoking jealousy in Luke, when all Lisa had been passionate for was a new high. He shook his head, this surfeit of information vying for space with the emotion. On some level, he registered the upshot of all this: the exoneration, and perhaps the rebirth of his career. But how could he indulge such an ideal conclusion, when Lisa herself was so far from the woman she had been?

This would take time. Months. Maybe years. The road to healing—for both of them—would be uncertain.

“Your arm,” Kitty said.

Luke looked at it. “Oh,” he said, and dragged it across his tee. It was bleeding freely, dripping on the linoleum. He hadn’t noticed.

“I’m going to get something for it,” Kitty said, and to Ramón: “You got a first-aid kit? I’ll get something for you, too.”

“To hell with him,” Luke said.

“You want him to pass out on you?”

Luke groaned. Ramón blinked more blood out of his eye and told Kitty there was a first-aid kit beneath the sink in the bathroom, and a cold compress in the freezer. She swept from the basement, thumped up the stairs. As the basement door swung open, Luke heard the rottweiler woofing and howling out in the yard.

He looked at Ramón, felt a rush of intense anger, then cooled it by looking at Lisa.