“I know my case is low on the totem pole. I just want to stay on your radar.”

“Mr. Hoffman,” she says, and I can’t help but notice the little bit of gravel in her voice. “I’m not going to forget about you. We’re working your case as hard as we work any other.”

A colleague of hers calls her name and she waves at me as she gets back to work. I leave the precinct with my hands in my pockets and my eyes on the sidewalk. I halt halfway down the block and look back at the police station.

I’ve kind of been thinking that if and when I happen to see JD in person, after all that time talking to one another, I would just kind of know it was her. Not anything as cheesy as a bolt of lightning. But maybe like a low-level surge of awareness. I’ll see JD and everything will just make sense. Right?

I pull my phone out and search for Detective Cabela in my contacts. There’s nothing there. Did she mean that I could call the precinct to contact her? Or was she implying that at some point we exchanged numbers? Is it possible that she’s a mislabeled contact in my address book?

I start walking again, cursing myself for not asking Detective Cabela to call me by my first name. I’m positive that if I heard her say Eliot, I would know whether or not she’s JD. Or, hell, I could have just asked her straight out.

“Hey . . . any chance that you’re JD?” I practice, asking the air in front of me with a casual flip of my hand, as if it doesn’t matter to me either way.

“No. But any chance you’re a crazy person?” my sister asks from beside me, appearing out of thin air and basically scaring me into the next dimension.

“OH MY GOD.”

“Hahahhahahaha. Wow. You should see yourself right now.” Judging from her reaction she’s never seen anything funnier than this.

“I imagine my hair is sticking straight up?”

“That jump-scare pretty much blew the eyebrows off your face just now.”

“Were you walking home from the train?”

“Yup.”

It’s then I realize that she’s shlepping an armful of shipping materials and that I should probably give my baby sister a hand.

“Thanks,” she says, quickly handing off 90 percent of the stuff in her arms. “Why were you talking to yourself?”

“Oh, I was just practicing something.”

“Practicing asking someone who they are?”

I feel a flush rising from under my collar. I tell Vera about almost everything in my life, but over the last two months, I’ve been keeping a fair amount from her. Should I just tell her about JD? Eh, I don’t exactly feel like getting teased about it at this particular moment. “Something like that.”