He “worked out when he had time,” which was, quite simply, a damned lie.

All that aside, Bill seemed nice enough. He didn’t look very much like his pictures on the app—he was skinnier and considerably less attractive—but then again, they never did. His profile had included the words Chicago’s Idris Elba, and that should’ve been her first big hint of the disappointments to come.

Claire didn’t understand the tendency to oversell. In fact, she tended to do the opposite. She chose to upload photos that were slightly less attractive than she was in real life. She could handle not being contacted in the first place, but she’d be damned if she had to deal with disappointment that she didn’t measure up to the pictures she posted online.

Bill was on his third Jack and apple juice and telling a story about his ex-wife, a story he never should have started. Claire was trying hard to focus instead of plotting her escape.

“Mara was a real go-getter, and now she’s a cop, just like you,” Bill said. “I think that’s one of the reasons why your profile caught my attention. I guess I’m just used to, you know, dealing with women in law enforcement.”

Claire speared a piece of asparagus and looked up at the word dealing. She bit her lip. It was only the second red flag (the apple juice had been the first), and she tried to remain open-minded. She was working hard on not writing men off too soon, since every single person in her life seemed to think she wrote men off too soon.

“It’s all those romantic comedies you watch,” her mother, Elaine, had said more times than Claire could count, spitting out the words with her heavy Jamaican accent. “You want everything to be roses. That’s what you expected from law school too.”

It always came back to the lawyer thing. Always. There was no misfortune, no disappointment that Elaine Puhl couldn’t tie back to the fact that Claire had graduated from University of Chicago Law and spent just three years practicing before deciding that it wasn’t for her.

Claire had loved that her life’s work centered around seeking justice in what often felt like an unbearably unjust world. But the law had tied her hands too much. So much was out of her control by the time the cases came her way.

Joining the Chicago Police Department had been the best decision of her life. Police work had given her a way to get closer to the crimes and the people who committed them. In the fourteen years since she had left law to become a detective, Claire had never once looked back.

Elaine Puhl, on the other hand, had made a career of looking back.