“Mrr,” Eddie said, very casually. Using Skyler’s head for leverage, he leapt to the ground and trotted over to the newcomers.

I smiled at Ryan. “It’s just like I’ve been saying all along.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

And then he smiled.

Chapter 22

Minnie! Are you all right?”

Rafe crushed me against his chest. I said something into his jacket that he couldn’t hear, so he uncrushed me, gave me a long kiss while a purring Eddie twined around our ankles, then looked into my face. “Sorry. What was that?”

“Why is Ash here?” Not that I wasn’t grateful, because I was indeed very pleased to see a law enforcement officer put handcuffs on Skyler, but I was puzzled.

“Oh. Him. Well . . .”

The slightly sheepish story came out. Ash had attended the same track meet and, longtime friends that they were, they sat next to each other, and somewhere between the running of the three-hundred-meter hurdles and the four-by-four-hundred relay, Ash asked what I was doing tonight.

“Telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth was the only option?” I asked.

The love of my life shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I? Good thing, too, don’t you think?”

“We would have been fine,” I said, but there was a slight quaver in my voice that wasn’t so sure. I bent to pick up Eddie, and, minor miracle, he let himself be scooped up and cuddled.

A sheriff’s vehicle drove down the road, its headlights sweeping across the parking lot, and came to a stop next to Ash’s vehicle. The uniformed deputy got out, conferred with Ash, and soon Skyler was tucked in the back of the deputy’s vehicle.

Ash and the deputy and Ryan went into a huddle slightly apart from Rafe and myself.

By now it was completely dark. The only light was from the various cars, and the sparkling of the stars up in the clear sky. I looked up, studying the cloudy dust of the Milky Way spreading from northeast to southwest, and tried to grasp that those clouds were actually the light from zillions of stars in one spiral arm of one galaxy.

“You’re cold.” Rafe put his arm around me.

“I’m fi-fine,” I said through chattering teeth. It wasn’t that cold, not really, so I wasn’t sure why I was shivering.

“Yo, Wolverson!” Rafe called. “Minnie’s turning into an ice cube. What’s the timeline here?”

After a short consultation between Ash and the deputy, it turned out that if the park entrance was taped off, none of us needed to be there at all, so Ash did that and we drove to the sheriff’s office in a small caravan, Ryan’s bicycle in the back of Rafe’s truck and Ryan himself riding with Ash. I selected my Happy Songs playlist and by the time we reached Chilson, I’d stopped shivering.