He had his phone out and his gaze flicked from her to it, as if checking her face against a photo. Her glimpse of it only showed something like a stopwatch. For half a second his face was expressionless, but then animation returned and he flashed her a wallet with his ID. “Sorry to come back so quickly, but our superiors want you to come along to the station and give a full statement. After that, we shouldn’t have to bother you with anything. Best to get it all done with, eh?” His smile was easier than Julian’s had been. So, if they were good cop and bad cop, who’s this? Gym bro cop?

She didn’t want to go, she realized. This wasn’t just a general reluctance to go with any police officer anywhere, from experiences of gay rights protests gone bad, reinforced by friends into civil disobedience and alternative lifestyles. Gym Bro made her nervous.

But she steeled herself. After all, this was the plan. She was going to find, by evasions, misunderstandings and sly jibes, just what the police knew about Mal.

“Fine,” she told Gym Bro. “Let’s go.” She grabbed her bag and pushed into the hall, locking her door behind her.

In the juddering lift he stood like a monolith, taking up way too much space. She tried a few nervous conversational assays like, “I don’t imagine I’ll be much help…,” but he parried them all easily with a smile and shallow encouragement. It was routine, be over soon, paperwork, you know.

The summer heat had made the whole building stuffy, and she braced herself for the hammer blow of the sun as she stepped out, shielding her eyes. But the air was chill, and she felt—imagined she felt—a flurry of cold grit against her cheek. She stopped very suddenly, and Gym Bro Cop sidestepped her neatly.

“Miss?” he asked.

And of course the sun was out and the air was warm as toast, and what had she been thinking, exactly? Is this going to be how it is now? Her own senses and memories were venturing out into terra incognita and bringing back stories she couldn’t trust. She apologized weakly. But they want to talk about Mal, so some of it must be real?

There was a black four-by-four with dark-tinted windows, and Gym Bro Cop skipped ahead a couple of steps to haul open one of the back doors. Lee baulked for a moment, then reminded herself of her mission. Find out what they know. In case her friend was still real and alive. And it was the police, after all, so worst-case scenarios were limited here. A night in the cells, a little shouting by some seventies TV stereotype in an interview room, a wasted day, a few homophobic slurs. Only later would she realize just how comfortable her growing-up had been, that her worries extended so far and no further.