“Do I really? Or do you just have the insatiable need to be a listening ear?”

Tessa raised two unimpressed eyebrows.

Micah sighed. “Seriously, I’m perfectly fine, Tessa.”

“Really? You’re perfectly fine?” she parroted. “Is that why you’re pushing around your curly fries – curly fries you love so much, you once made up an embarrassing haiku about them that one time we were drunk – instead of, I don’t know? Actually eating them?”

Micah’s face reddened. “Sorry if my appetite’s trash because I was busy processing a dead body this morning,” he snapped.

Instead of snipping back at him, Tessa merely nodded sympathetically, and Micah realized he’d been had. His shoulders slumped. “Sorry,” he muttered.

Tessa reached across the table and took him by the hand. “It’s okay, Micah.”

And just like that, all of Micah’s pent-up emotions started spilling out. It wasn’t like a dam flooding, where everything came bursting out at once, but rather a slow, messy leak where his hands started trembling and his eyes filled with tears of their own accord.

It would have been embarrassing if Micah wasn’t so upset.

“It’s just… his body was fresh, Tessa,” he said, voice hushed. “The autopsy will take a few days to complete, but there’s no way Nico was dead for more than a day – two, at most – before he was dumped.”

They both knew what that meant.

“You don’t know that for sure,” Tessa pointed out reasonably. “It’s below freezing outside. It’s possible for a body to be preserved-”

Micah shook his head. “I know, Tessa. I know Nico was still alive when I got his case.”

“Micah,” Tessa started, voice careful – it was very unlike her. “It’s not your-”

“I know I didn’t kill him, okay?” Micah interrupted before she could finish the asinine sentence. “But you didn’t see his body. He was naked, Tessa. And beat to all hell. There were rope burns around his wrists and ankles.” Micah knew he shouldn’t be giving out this information to someone not working directly on the case, but he couldn’t help himself. “Who knows what the sick fuck was doing to him while I sat there… doing what exactly? Chatting up his roommate? Scrolling through his Instagram? Outing him as a porn star to his parents, who, by the way, are fucking devastated that their son is dead?”

“Micah-” Tessa tried again.

“No, Tessa! I don’t want to hear it. Do you know what I was doing this weekend while Nico was being tortured by some psycho? I was fucking around with Damon, meeting his family and binging fancy Italian cuisine. I didn’t even think of Nico once-

“Micah, stop it-”

“I didn’t kill him, okay? I’ll acknowledge that. But please don’t tell me it’s not my fault. Because I didn’t save him either.”