ONE

Bullshit.”

“Nope.” I turned over the cards on the table between us, and there it was: three aces take the game.

McIntyre groaned. “I hate playing with you. You’re so damn lucky.”

“Me and my charmed life,” I said, deadpan, as I gathered the cards in a stack and tapped their rounded corners into place. Across the table, McIntyre tried and failed to catch my eye. “This has got to stop, Shay.”

She was talking about my mood. It had been black lately; she wasn’t wrong about that. Four months since my rebirth in the Thousand Islands. Three weeks since it all went to hell. Tim once told me things were simple around here, but that was before the murders and the drowning, before the fiancé I kicked to the curb. If that was what passed for simple in Upstate New York, I didn’t want to see things get complicated.

I reached behind me, pulled a blanket from the back of my chair onto my lap, and smoothed the fabric over my knees. There was a quilt for every patron on the covered patio at Nelly’s Bistro, thoughtfully placed for Clayton’s chilly mornings. I was only a little cold, didn’t need the throw any more than I needed a third cup of coffee, but the card game was over and I found I couldn’t quiet my hands. “I know,” I told Mac. “It’s not that easy.”

“Who cares about easy? You’re Shana Merchant, the badass who solved the bloodiest case these parts have seen in years.”

Baptism by fire, as they say—or in my case, water. “Cue the ticker tape parade.”

“Great idea,” she said. “Only instead of ticker tape we’ll shred those damned corruption case files from my desk and blanket Church Street in confetti. Bear claw?”

I looked askance at the pastry in her hand. “Isn’t it taboo to chase breakfast with dessert?”

“It’s my birthday.”

“Not yet it’s not.”

Extricating a slice of almond from the frosted dough, she swiped at me, catlike. “Close enough—and when you’re fifty, you get to do whatever you want. I’m thinking about chasing this dessert with that hunky Canadian border guard.”

I laughed, had to, because I knew which guard she was talking about, and he was more scrumptious than any pastry Nelly’s could produce. Where would I be without Maureen McIntyre and her uncompromising humor? It still came as a shock to me that we were friends, especially when I thought of her in the context of her work. If someone manufactured Sheriff McIntyre posters for fangirls, I’d have taped one to my bedroom wall—if I had a wall to call my own, that is. Mac was my professional idol, but she was also the person without whom I’d be homeless. Most of my things were in storage, but thanks to the sheriff of Jefferson County I had a La-Z-Boy couch and the best company a person in my situation could hope for.