“Yeah, well,” he says, and then slams on the brakes. He lays on the horn as a guy in red-and-black basketball shorts shoulders his bag and shuffles across the street. “I should arrest him for jaywalking,” Teddy murmurs, glaring at the kid through the windshield. “You know what irritates me?” he asks, forgetting about Josie for a moment. “These kids think they’re invincible.”

“You sound like Truman.”

“Wait—hear me out. So they think they’re the only ones who can screw up, you know? Like, take basketball shorts over there”—he points to the kid now disappearing in the rearview mirror—“he knows he shouldn’t do that, right, walk out in front of a moving vehicle? But he thinks he’s the only one doing something wrong. He doesn’t realize that I could be drunk, texting, yelling at my kids in the back seat. A whole number of things might distract me so that I’m not paying attention. I might be a crazy lunatic who decides that today’s the day I end a life. He takes for granted that everyone around him is doing the right thing, and so it’s no big deal if he messes up.”

“Uh-huh,” I say, watching another group of young people dart across the street ahead of us. “And what does this have to do with Katie and true love?”

“Nothing.” He rubs his jaw. “It’s just irritating, you know? Their complete lack of awareness. Josie was devastated after she and Chad-Chaz broke up. Cried for weeks. Said she had imagined a whole future with him. Buying a house, kids, even sitting on their front porch as old people in rocking chairs, for god’s sake. Guess how long they’d been together?”

I look at him.

“No really, guess.”

“Two months?”

“Five weeks. Five. But she’d already had enough time to imagine a whole lifetime with the guy.”

“Dodged a bullet there,” I say, stretching my arms above my head. Josie went to Emory and now works for Doctors Without Borders. Charlie works at a vape store or something. “And she was in high school,” I remind him.

“She was seventeen. You really think that much changes in a year or two if you’re in college, living with a dozen other kids just like you, Mommy and Daddy paying for everything, and all you have to do is show up for class?” A hint of bitterness there, but I don’t push it. Teddy’s dad died when he was nine; his mother would move mountains for him and his sisters, but money was always tight.

“Murder for love—poetic, I guess.”

Teddy pulls the car alongside a beautiful white stucco house elevated a dozen or so feet above Milledge Avenue.

“Gamma Delta Alpha Delta, right?”

“Jesus—say that ten times fast.”

Six

Thursday, November 14, noon