“What about the skunk somebody smeared all over Katherine’s car?”

He picks up an empty can, shakes it, then drops it back to the table. “What about it?”

“Oh my God. Really? I saw your face when I told you about the opossum. You didn’t say a word. I had to hear about the skunk from Sam.”

Paul frowns. “Okay, but did he also tell you they caught the guy? Some asshole who confused Katherine’s car for his cheating wife’s. The opossum was meant to scare you, yeah, but the message was intended for me. Micah told me what they wrote in the snow.”

A headache starts up at the base of my brain, a low-slung throbbing of confusion. Paul always has an answer for everything, which means he’s either telling the truth or is exceptionally good at lying. I study his face, the light illuminating him in shadowy patches. The spiderweb of fine lines around his eyes, the deeper ones on either side of his mouth, the way the thinning scab is pulling on his brow. He looks at me, his eyes flecked with gold, and God help me, I want so desperately to believe him.

But I don’t.

“What about Jax? Why have you been helping him all this time?”

“I already told you. I owe him my life. I owe him everything.”

I’ve heard the story multiple times. Jax dragged Paul out of the lake by his ankles when they were kids. It’s why Paul won’t stick a toe in the lake, because he almost drowned, and Jax saved him. “Because he pulled you out of the lake? I know it scared the crap out of you, but—”

“That’s not the time I’m referring to. I’m talking about another time. After Katherine.”

He pauses, and I brace for whatever new bombshell he’s going to drop on me now. All this time I’ve been waiting for him to bring her up, and now here we are, and I’m not sure I want to hear it. This is the scary part.

“Jax was there for me in a way no one else was. Not even Micah. You know how people were looking at me back then. God, like they’re looking at me now, at this dump of a restaurant. Like I’m pretty sure you’re looking at me, too.”

I shake my head, hard, then stop myself. The denial happened automatically, like an old instinct, that instant before I realized that he was right. I have been looking at him like that. “I know you loved Katherine. I know that. But you never talk about her, and then I saw the files on your laptop. The pictures and the other stuff. The finances. Her infertility. And then I hear that all this time, I’ve been living in her house—”