“I’m not crazy,” Matty said.

“Of course, I didn’t think—”

The knob on the inner door rattled, and Shaw’s first, instinctive thought was of North, and it sent a whole-body flush burning through him.

“Why is this locked? North, open up. North!”

Shaw recognized that voice. His flush died, but the prickling heat lingered. He tugged Matty out of the way—wishing he didn’t notice how soft Matty’s hands were, how nicely proportioned his fingers, how Matty’s grip tightened around Shaw’s—but before Shaw could answer the door, Pari was screaming again.

“You can’t just charge in there like Hitler occupying the Sudetenland in 1938.”

“Is she—” Matty began.

“World Civ.” Shaw twisted the lock. “Two.” And he opened the door.

Tucker Laguerre stood there. As far as Shaw was concerned, Tucker’s essential quality was that he made Shaw want to punch him. Specifically, in the face. Part of it was the face itself: Tucker looked like exactly what he was—the result of generations of waspy breeding, culminating in the perfectly tanned, perfectly toned, perfectly coiffed asshole who had married Shaw’s best friend. But only part of it was the face. The rest of the reason was Tucker’s personality.

“North—” Tucker pushed past Shaw, sparing a bare glance for Matty, and then spinning in a circle when he reached the center of the office. “Where’s North?”

“Hi, Tuck.”

“He’s not answering my phone calls, and he’s not at home. So where is he?”

“He’s working. This is his job. He works here.”

Tucker had this way of managing not to change his expression at all and still somehow conveying his total disgust with Shaw. He was doing an A+ performance of it right then. “He shouldn’t be out working on his own, Shaw, in case you forgot, Shaw, because, Shaw, he doesn’t have his fucking license, Shaw, or did you forget about that, Shaw?”

“He has a license,” Shaw said to Matty. Then, to Tucker, “He has his license. It’s just suspended.”

“I want to know where he is.”

“I don’t know where he is. He’s working.”

“Maybe I should wait outside—” Matty began.

Shaw caught his wrist. “No. Stay. Tucker is the one who barged in here while I was meeting with a client.” Shaw let the stress fall hard on the last word.

At the word, Tucker’s attention flicked to Matty once again. “I have something private to talk about with him.” Matty nodded, twisted free, and scurried out of the room. Tucker slammed the door shut. He turned on Shaw, and Shaw had to fight the impulse to take a step back.

Tucker wasn’t a particularly big man—not as tall or as muscled as North, for example—but there was something monumental about Tucker’s anger. Normally, the anger lay under a thin gilt foil, and when you first saw Tucker, all you saw was the sparkle. That’s how it had been in college, especially the first two years. Back then, maybe that layer of glitter hadn’t been so thin. Or maybe they’d all just been too young to know what was happening. But there had been signs. There had been brawls at frat parties. There had been fistfights outside dive bars. There had been screaming bouts that had extinguished one friendship after another. There had been Trace Montenegro’s dorm room and Tucker’s riddle about an oxymoron—What’s the only literary device that can win a fistfight?. Trace hadn’t liked the answer; Tucker had demonstrated, and it had left Trace with a broken nose. But those things had never happened with Shaw, and never with North, and rarely with Peter and Paul and Rufus, so Tuck was allowed to stay in the group through grace. Until the summer after sophomore year when Tuck had spilled a plastic cup of Bud Lite down the front of the Tommy Bahama shirt he was wearing (worn ironically, he had told everyone as loudly as he could), and Joey Manakowski had laughed.