“As if you read my mind.”

“Good.”

“This is much better than New Hampshire,” she says with a slight purr in her voice. “Apology accepted.”

“I missed the part where I said I was sorry.”

“Don’t worry, Matthew, dear. It’s understood.”

They’re sprawled out on reclining chairs right on the beach, mere yards from the crashing surf. Quinn and Jana flew down to Turks and Caicos separately. They booked rooms in hotels a mile apart. They weren’t supposed to see each other, in fact, until this evening at six, when all of the Stingrays were gathering in person to discuss strategy.

But then Jana texted: Meet me for a quick drink?

Ordinarily, Quinn prefers to spend his time in a dimly lit climate-controlled room with white noise or classical music playing in the background as he considers the clues, eyewitness accounts, and narrative elements of the case at hand.

But then Quinn read those six words again and thought about Jana’s playful smile as she thumbed them into her cell. So he replied: Cocktails on the beach? Because why not combine some relaxed case meditation with a little daytime drinking?

Drinking for Jana, that is. Quinn never imbibes when he’s in the middle of a case. She doesn’t know that Quinn pulled the bartender aside when they first arrived at the beachfront cafe and instructed him to mix proper cocktails for the lady, virgins for himself. She was the type who could only relax when she thought everyone else around her was relaxing, too.

“Let’s go for a swim,” she says suddenly, gently nudging him in the ribs.

“But we have drinks on the way.”

“You mean you’d rather sit around and sip juice than jump waves with me? I know you never drink on a case. Which is why I asked the bartender to serve us both virgins.”

“Hmmm. So we’re paying full price for fruit juice.”

“Appears that way. I knew that if you thought I was relaxing you’d take it easy, too, for a change. So come on, my love. Last one to the beach pays for the wildly expensive fruit juice!”

Naturally, Jana beats him to the crashing waves. Quinn dives in after her, but she’s a fraction of a second ahead of him. He sucks down foaming surf as he falls, then comes up laughing, despite himself. She leaps over a wave. The same wave smashes into Quinn, nearly knocking him off his feet. She laughs. Only she can do this to him. Take him back to the giddiness of being twelve years old. Even though twelve was a particularly rough year for Quinn.

In carefree moments like these, Quinn can be fooled into thinking that he and Jana could have a life together. What more do you need than sand, water, laughter, and expensive fruit juice? She soothes the turmoil in his soul like no one else alive.

But the effect is temporary. Jana is a brilliant actor, but she can only keep up the facade for so long. They tried it once. Living together. It was destined for failure, because whenever Quinn’s obsessed with a case, he has one default setting: brood. At first Jana played the role of the supportive partner, letting Quinn have his space. But she quickly tired of it, because it turned out that Quinn needed his space almost all of the time. Actors, like most people, need someone else in the scene.