Touching the throbbing cut at the corner of his eye, North checked to make sure the bandage hadn’t peeled away. In light of all the effort to make perfect, visual sense of where the two of them stood, North couldn’t figure out how things had slipped so far out of the frame. Part of it, he knew, was the lying. North adjusted the tape over the fresh, broken weal that Tuck had opened along the back of his hand last night. His mind followed its usual divided path. One part of him was already explaining, a kind of internal autocorrect that wrote over the events of last night. Tuck had been tired. Tuck had been worried. Tuck had a temper, and he was jealous, and North—if he were totally honest with himself—liked that he was still able to get a rise out of Tuck, liked that just by coming home smelling like leather and sweat and cigarette smoke, he could turn Tuck into a maniac. North had basically been asking for the strap. He really only had himself to blame.

But the other part of his mind was tiptoeing through dark rooms, already stitching together the story he’d tell Shaw to explain the split skin near his eyes, the bruises, the broken weal on the back of his hand. Boxing. Boxing had worked for a long time. North would just say that he’d gotten up early, headed to the gym, and gotten in a few rounds of sparring. It’s not like Shaw would wonder. It’s not like Shaw would even know what time boxing gyms opened. Hell, for that matter, North didn’t know what time boxing gyms opened.

And the upstairs shower was still running. At some point, North knew, he’d run out of track on one of those two paths inside his head. At some point, he’d stop being able to tell the right story. At some point, that internal autocorrect would stop editing. He wasn’t sure what he’d do then. When it had first gotten really bad with Tuck, when the lawyers’ bills had started piling up and the Marvin Hanson case was on every channel, North had never allowed himself even to consider telling Shaw. But an idea had germinated in the darkness of that second path in his mind. Just a small idea, really. A keyhole shaped glimmer of a possibility that North was spying through all the doors he’d locked and bolted on the inside. They’d be upstairs in Shaw’s living room. Shaw would be holding one of those ridiculous knock-off Louis XIV teacups, his slender fingers curled around the porcelain, and North would have a bottle of Schlafly’s and he’d have his thumb under the label and he’d be picking away at it, and they’d talk.