He touched her thigh just below the hem of the sweatshirt. He waited for her to remove his hand. And when she didn’t, he waited for her to close her own over it. He waited for the surf to tell him something, to suddenly know the right thing to say.

“I won’t die,” he said and cleared his throat. “And I won’t betray you. Because if I do betray you”—and he was as sure of this as he’d ever been of anything—“I definitely will die.”

And she smiled at him, her teeth the white of ivory in the night.

Then she peeled off the sweatshirt and came to him, brown and beautiful and shaking from fear.

“When I was fourteen,” she told Jay that night as she lay beside him, “I looked just like my mother had. And my father noticed.”

“And acted upon it?” Jay said.

“What do you think?”

“Trevor give you his speech about grief?” Jay asked us as the waitress brought us two more coffees and another beer. “The one about grief being carnivorous?”

“Yeah,” Angie said.

Jay nodded. “Gave me the same speech when he hired me.” He held his hands out in front of him on the table, turned them back and forth. “Grief isn’t carnivorous,” he said. “Grief is my hands.”

“Your hands,” Angie said.

“I can feel her flesh in them,” he said. “Still. And the smells?” He tapped his nose. “Sweet Jesus. The scent of sand on her skin or the salt in the air coming through the screens of that fisherman’s shack? Grief, I swear to God, doesn’t live in the heart. It lives in the senses. And sometimes, all I want to do is cut off my nose so I can’t smell her, hack my fingers off at the joint.”

He looked at us, as if suddenly realizing we were there.

“You son of a bitch,” Angie said and her voice cracked as tears glistened on her cheekbones.

“Shit,” Jay said. “I forgot. Phil. Angie, I’m sorry.”

She waved away his hand and wiped her face with a cocktail napkin.

“Angie, really, I—”

She shook her head. “It’s just sometimes, I hear his voice and the sound of it is so clear, I’d swear he’s sitting beside me. And for the rest of the day, that’s all I can hear. Nothing else.”

I knew better than to reach for her hand, but she surprised me by suddenly reaching for mine.

I closed my thumb over hers and she leaned into me.

So this, I wanted to say to Jay, is what you felt with Desiree.

It was Jay who came up with the idea to rip off the money Jeff Price had stolen from Grief Release.