Larkin pressed the knuckles of his right fist against the desktop for grounding, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried to breathe through the commotion of Widalski ushering students to the door with orders to use the rest of the period as a study hall at the library—yes, that includes you, Devon. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his left hand, waited until the noise level in the room dropped, then ceased entirely as the last of the students filtered into the hall. “Jesus Christ,” he finally muttered.

“Hey.” Doyle tugged on the hair tie around Larkin’s wrist. “Do you need me to leave you alone for a minute?”

Larkin considered the offer. He would have appreciated being alone. A few seconds to realign his senses without distraction, a heartbeat to adjust his composure, his stance, his attitude, a minute for them both to read their parts in this play, pretend that everything was okay. But as badly as Larkin wanted that—frankly, needed that—it felt profoundly… like cowardice. Wrong to turn away the one man who never took it personally. Wrong to shut out the one man who understood that Larkin was different, and that different was okay. Wrong to not show himself, the good and bad, the beautiful and ugly, the strong and sick, to the one man who hoped every day that Larkin would say yes.

Larkin lowered his hand from his face and looked up. “You can stay.” He cleared his throat and tried to say as casually as his modulated tone would allow, “Sometimes there’s so much stimulation to sort and catalogue that even Xanax can’t keep up.”

“Evie,” Doyle said, his voice a whisper.

“I know.”

“After last week—”

“I know,” Larkin said, his tone more clipped. His chest itched, a panic-induced sweat had broken out, but he ignored it and returned his attention to the gold picture frame. He flipped it around and worked the fastenings free.

“Straight men do love selfies taken with fish,” Doyle commented, voice a little rough around the edges. “But a framed photo of themselves on their own desk? At minimum, you’d expect whoever snapped the picture to share the moment with Reynold.”

“My thoughts as well.” Larkin took the cardboard backing off, and with the blunt edge of his fingernail, tugged the photograph free. What came up with the largemouth bass picture were two separate portraits of young white girls—Larkin would estimate they were no older than fourteen or fifteen—each wearing ensembles unique enough that he could roughly identify the ’90s in one and the early ’00s in the other, although their clothing had been tugged down and hiked up in places to suggest something horribly sexual had taken place.

Both were posed on subway benches, hands delicately folded against their stomachs.

Both were dead.

Larkin said, “Mr. Gary Reynold has been very, very bad….”

CHAPTER NINE