Doyle set his fork down. He scratched at his stubble a moment. “Remember when you told me how it felt incredible to meet someone who understood your love language, even if it wasn’t their own?”

“Of course.”

“In the past, most guys have equated my need for touch with sex. Don’t get me wrong, I love sex, but for me, touch isn’t only about skin-on-skin. It’s about the way someone smells. The way they sound. The way their smile makes me feel. When I listen to that voicemail, I feel… at home. You feel like home. And I think, if someone can make me that comfortable, they must understand my language pretty well too.”

Larkin felt as if he was standing outside himself, watching a sort of belly-twisting vertigo effect take place—the kitchen, the apartment, the city shrinking out of view—the moment, the second, zooming in on him, closer and closer until bam. The beat that’d been building in Larkin’s chest since Monday, March 30 at 9:44 a.m., dropped suddenly, and his spirit was flung free from his body—the sense of tipping backward in his chair, falling through the floor, the Earth, shooting through the cosmos before being blown apart into millions of pieces of stardust, scattered to the farthest reaches of the universe where time didn’t exist and mourning wasn’t a concept and there was nothing to latch onto but only the most naked of truths.

“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Could it be that in seeking himself, in pushing aside the veil, Larkin glimpsed a treasure that looked a little bit like calluses and cardamon and whiskey and pyrite? And that he wasn’t a nobody—because on Wednesday, April 1, at 4:56 p.m., Doyle had kissed him and Larkin hadn’t been gray, but was instead a rainbow. His treasure made him feel like a somebody. His treasure made him feel like this was a tried-and-true partnership.

In art and investigation.

In life and death.

In love.

Larkin’s treasure was Ira Doyle.

And his heart had simply been waiting for his mind to catch up.

A knock at the front door brought Larkin back like the snap of a rubber band, his insides reverberating like kettledrums while he scrambled not to lose hold on all the profound sensations that’d accompanied his epiphany. Larkin watched Doyle push his chair back and stand.

“I’ll get it. It’s probably Mr. Gabel.”

Humphrey Gabel, the clog-wearing octogenarian who lived above them in 5A, stopped by at least twice a week under the guise of updating Doyle on the comings and goings of the building, but Larkin suspected the truth of the matter was that the elderly man was lonely and Doyle had proven to be the only neighbor who’d ever given him the time of day.

Larkin scrubbed his face with both hands, listened to Doyle unlock and open the door—