Tuck had punched him so hard that there was actually this popping noise like Joey was a balloon animal, and Joey went down on his knees. And it didn’t stop there. Tuck took off his driving moc, pushed Joey forward, and beat the shit out of him. With his shoe. While everyone watched. Everyone except North. North intervened. North dragged Tucker out of the house, and then Shaw drove Joey Manakowski to the hospital for treatment for an orbital fracture.

There had been criminal charges. And a civil suit. And with traditional waspy magic, Tucker’s parents had made both go away. And, as far as Shaw knew, that had been the turning point. Junior and senior year had been different: no more drunken fistfights, no more screaming. It might have been a million different reasons. Maybe Tucker had gotten therapy. But for Shaw, the answer had crystallized that spring night at the end of senior year when he had sat on the Sigma Sigma roof and listened through the window as Tucker asked North, “God, please tell me you haven’t been out there blowing Shaw.”

Now, with Tucker advancing on him in the office, all those thoughts went through Shaw’s head like a stormcloud, but the one that lingered was the way Tucker’s hand had crumpled the driving moccasin, the way the suede had folded under the heel of his hand, and the clapping noise it made when he brought it down on Joey’s back.

The tape dispenser, Shaw thought. I’ll put the fucking tape dispenser in his eye if he keeps coming.

And then, to Shaw’s total surprise, Tuck’s whole body bucked, and Shaw realized that he was trying to keep from crying.

“Tuck? Tucker?” This was the second man who had started crying in Shaw’s office that day, and it was throwing off Shaw’s whole universe.

“Is North having an affair?”

Shaw was shaking his head automatically, mechanically, but his mind was racing. It was like someone had touched a match to a trail of gasoline. And he was shocked at the ferocious heat of his next thought: Please, please, God, let North be fucking somebody else.

“Are you and North sleeping together?”

“What?” That snapped Shaw back to reality. “Jesus Christ. Of course not.”

“Who? Who is it, Shaw?” Tuck still hadn’t broken into tears, but he wiped at dry eyes, and his whole body continued to be racked by those dry sobs. “What piece of alley ass is he out there fucking while I’m home, worried sick—”

“Tuck, he’s not cheating on you. Honest to God. He’s not.”

“He came home late last night. Way later than usual, and all he’d say was that he’d been working, but I could smell booze on him, and—”

“We were working. That’s the truth. We went to Allure because—it’s a whole thing, ok, and I can’t tell because of client confidentiality. But it’s a bar, and we had to get some info, so we had a few drinks while we chatted up the bartender.” Tucker eyed Shaw like he was checking a fresh twenty for counterfeiting. “Tuck, North isn’t a cheater. He’s not. He loves you—”