Her job was an unendingly stressful catalog of nerve-shredding arrests and mind-numbing reports—and he was an antidote to that, always so good-natured and curious, an exclamation point or question mark springing from the backs of his sentences as he pointed out funny things like the call of a rare bird or a constellation in the night sky.

She was focused on the practicality of the day-to-day—groceries, oil changes, bills, securing her detective license—while he constantly spoke of a future that didn’t exist, like going surfing in Australia (even though he didn’t know how to surf) or starting a horror movie club (even though he didn’t know who he would invite to it). In a way, he drove her nuts, but in another way, it felt like a good kind of nuts. A new and easier way of encountering the world. Sometimes she joked with him, saying how nice it must be to go through life with the dreamy optimism of a white dude, but the barbs were always softened by the understanding that he was his own unique brand of weird.

He never stopped surprising her with questions. How do you keep your posture so straight? How do you put somebody in a choke hold? Do you want to take salsa lessons? Who is your favorite writer? Do you like it when I touch you like this? What is the greatest love song ever written? How do you make a New Year’s resolution that you actually follow through on? What kind of lotion do you want me to use when I’m giving you a full body massage? How do you solve a crime? Do you ever feel bad for the people you bust?

For all his questions, he never asked the ones she hated most: “Can I touch your hair?” and “What are you?” What are you? is the queen bee of white-people questions. They never seemed to realize how soaked it was with the implication of otherness. You don’t belong, so how do you fit? She got hit with it on a weekly basis and had finally bitten back at enough of her colleagues that they knew to shut the fuck up. Her lighter complexion apparently confused people, and given all Jack’s obsessions with categorization, she felt certain the day was coming when he asked an unforgivable question.