Hazard sat very still for a moment, the iced tea cold in his hand, running his thumb through the condensation collecting on the glass. He tried to calculate the odds that a meteor would hit Earth in the next five seconds. Not a big one. It could just be the size of golf ball. It could just come hurtling down and hit him right in the back of the head; everybody else could be fine, no collateral damage, maybe just a broken window to reglaze.

“Marcus, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry I’m an asshole to Nico. I’m sorry Nico’s an asshole to you. Life’s just . . . complicated like that. If things never work out between you and Nico, I’m sure you’ll find someone else who’s great.” Hazard didn’t really believe that, but he’d heard enough of Somers’s bullshit to parrot a line or two.

Princess meowed violently, expressing her own opinion on the matter.

“Here’s the thing,” Marcus said. “We were so good when we were together—”

“I really don’t think we have time to get into this,” Hazard said.

“But then, out of the clear blue, he said, ‘I think we’ll be better as friends.’ What does that even mean?”

“Let’s focus on where Nico might be. Do you have any ideas?”

“I mean, how does that make any kind of sense? ‘Better as friends.’ We already were friends. We were just adding something great on top of it, right?”

“Marcus, focus. Could Nico have disappeared last night?”

“And then I told Alexandra, and she said she thought maybe he just needed some space because, well, you were in his life again. This was right after he got arrested and they thought he killed that woman. So I think it was just an excuse, right? Like, he was really confused, and he didn’t know what to do, so it’ll probably be fine, right? He and I, we’re going to work it out.”

Hazard thought of the way Nico and Mitchell had been awkwardly flirting for weeks now. “I think if someone says you’re better as friends, it probably means he doesn’t have romantic feelings for you.”

Marcus’s eyes welled, and he squeezed Princess so tightly that she let out a long, drawn-out kitty groan.

“Right at that particular moment, I mean,” Hazard said. Someone at the back of his head was watching this whole shitshow and shaking his head in disappointment.

Wiping his eyes, Marcus grinned and said, “Yeah, exactly. Like, that just wasn’t the right moment. That’s exactly right.”

Before Hazard could betray any of his other values, he said, “When was the last time you talked to Nico?”

“This morning. Hold on, he—” Marcus went for his phone, and Princess seized the opportunity to leap out of his arms and disappear into the bedroom. “He sent me a snap. Look.”

It was a classic Nico picture: lying on the bed, his shaggy hair carefully tousled, no shirt, arm behind his head to expose a tastefully shaved pit, which was a phrase Hazard hadn’t been familiar with prior to dating Nico. Across the lower third of the picture, Nico had scrawled GOOD MORNING.