“Please don’t cry—” Shaw had already had two criers today; he couldn’t handle a third. “You don’t need to—” The front door slammed. “Cry.” When Shaw glanced over his shoulder, Matty was fighting a smile. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“It’s just—it’s cute.”

“What? Watching me break hearts?”

Matty lost the fight and leaned forward, burying his face in Shaw’s shoulder and laughing.

That was when Pari chose to appear in the door, a mammoth textbook splayed open, her finger pointing to a bolded section of text. “He stormed out of here,” she announced. “Just like the Finnish ambassador on the thirteenth day of the Paris Peace Convention of 1946.”

“Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed, please help me,” Shaw said, catching Matty’s arm and tugging him toward the door.

Chapter 13

Shaw followed Matty—the boy drove a snappy blue Volvo, which meant that RiverChurch must have been doing pretty well—to an apartment in Soulard. The neighborhood was a mixture of incomes and degrees of gentrification, but Matty lived in a newly remodeled loft inside what had once been a shoe factory. The exposed brick and steel and concrete didn’t really fit the churchboy, but the building’s front entry had two secured doors, and when Shaw examined the door on the loft, it passed inspection.

“Just don’t open it for anyone you don’t know,” he said, tapping the peephole.

Matty grinned, playing with the cardigan, stretching it away from his long, lean form.

“Is that a totally stupid thing to say?” Shaw asked.

“I’m not that naive.”

“You’d be surprised, though.” Shaw moved into the loft itself. “It’s an easy mistake to make.”

Shaw found some of what he expected from the son of a pastor, and he found some of what he expected from a boy who had repressed his sexuality too long. The line of demarcation between those two categories was clearly in flux. Religious paintings that must have once dominated the walls were now leaning together in a pile, while the only thing to take their place was one of those color-pop photographs of the San Francisco skyline in black and white, with two spots in color: the bridge, and then, tucked into the corner, a rainbow pride flag.

“Is it too on the nose?”

Shaw grinned and flipped through the paintings that Matty had taken down. They were all fairly standard prints that could have come from any Christian bookstore or website. Nothing of particular artistic merit. Nothing too strongly theological, although Shaw supposed that the days of artwork as another battlefield for the vicious struggle between consubstantiation and transubstantiation might have passed, oh, five hundred years ago. Some of the prints still had price tags on the back of the canvases, which made Shaw’s grin widen. It looked like Matty Fennmore wasn’t very detail-minded—or maybe he just didn’t care enough to peel off the tags.

“No. It’s nice.”

“You hate it. It’s ok. You can tell me you hate it.”

“I said it’s nice. What are you going to do with these?”