Luke looked at her and tried a smile. She tried one back. Yeah, he was doing okay.

He made her scrambled eggs and sausage with a hot buttered bagel on the side. She took it onto the back stoop to eat, clearly feeling more comfortable at the rear of the house, which couldn’t be seen from the road. Luke joined her a moment later with a bagel of his own, smeared with peanut butter, and they ate together in silence. Or a near-silence, anyway; Kitty made mewling, grateful sounds as she forked food into her mouth. She cleaned her plate entirely.

“Well, I guess that answers that question,” Luke said.

“I guess so.”

“More coffee?”

“Sure. But hey, I can get it.”

She took her empty plate and both their mugs into the kitchen, and emerged a moment later with refills. She handed Luke his, then resumed her place on the stoop. They sipped their coffees quietly, letting the morning grow around them.

“You know how long it took me to climb over your back fence?” Kitty asked when just enough time had passed.

Luke stared into his mug, his brow cut with a long frown. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. The birds in the eucalyptus chattered inanely. He wasn’t about to join them.

“You want to know what’s going on,” Kitty said. It wasn’t a question.

“Only if you want to tell me,” Luke replied. He scratched his beard and fixed her with an honest stare. “But first, you need to know three things.”

“Okay.”

“Number one: Whatever you tell me, you can trust me. Number two: I won’t judge you, because heaven knows we’ve all done things we regret. Number three: I have lived with my fair share of injustice and pain. That gives me a jaded but realistic perspective, and if I can use that to help you, I will.”

Kitty nodded. She drank from her mug and sighed, looking around Luke’s modest backyard, perhaps wondering where to begin. Finally, she said, “Have you noticed anybody unusual hanging around outside my apartment? A stocky white guy with a shaved head and skull tattoos? Or a tall guy . . . looks like a Viking?”

Luke gave it a moment’s thought, then shook his head. “No, but I didn’t leave the house yesterday, and I bet I didn’t look out the front window more than three or four times.”

Kitty sighed again, and this went deep, all the way to the base of her belly, and out in a hard rush of air.

“I told you I was a courier,” she said, “and that was true. But what I used to courier was drugs. First meth and ecstasy, then canary.”

“Canary?” Luke bit his lip, but couldn’t get the surprised note out of his voice. “Oh . . . okay.”

“No, Luke. It’s not okay.”