“Maybe. But I think it’s more interesting this way.” This time his smile is undeniably mocking. “We spoke to Ms. Van Doren, Simon’s daughter,” he says, turning to me. “She mentioned you.”

I go quiet. I have no idea what Taylor could have said about me, but whatever it was, it has this detective looking at me like a red stain on a white sheet. Nate shoots me a confused glance, but I don’t meet his eyes. I don’t want it to come off as if we’re colluding.

“We’re speaking to everyone who was close to the victim,” Bierman clarifies. “Everything is important at this stage. I’m sure you understand.”

“I do, I’m just confused. I mean, I wasn’t close to Simon.”

His face angles. “You weren’t?”

“Not by any stretch of the word,” I say, attempting a laugh, but it comes out as a croak.

“Really?” He shoots a baffled look at Glover, but it seems more performative than necessary, and then his eyes are back on mine. “I heard you got fired recently,” he says, and I try to be cool, but then he shifts, and I see the shaft of his gun again, dark and vulgar. When you see a gun on TV, it feels casual. Exciting. This does not feel casual. This is not exciting.

My heart thumps, but I shrug to feign nonchalance. I’m not going to give anything away until I know where this is going. I take a breath and try to work out why Taylor would have told the cops about me getting fired. Why it would have even come up. Wouldn’t they mainly be concerned with rehashing Simon’s last moments, the last time Taylor saw him, things like that? I should have never come up in the conversation, much less my being fired from the internship. But clearly, Taylor slipped it in somehow.

“I was let go,” I say in a horrible, small voice, hyper-aware of Nate tucking his chin and shifting his weight from leg to leg like he is embarrassed. “It was just an internship, but I don’t get what that has to do with what happened.”

“By Mr. Van Doren himself,” he says, steadying a barbed look on me, and I see it now: he’s suspicious, not just in that way all cops are suspicious, but in a super-pointed way like he already has his own theory.

My mind flips back to Taylor. What else did she tell him? What ideas did she put in his head?

“What went wrong there?” Bierman asks, taking a small step toward me, and I nearly cower back. “It’s not every day an intern gets released in such a personal manner by the CEO. There was an HR department who could have handled that, no?”

“It was...something I wasn’t up front about. So I was dismissed.”