His voice is rusty and high-pitched. “You need to stop doing that. You’re always doing that. Do you know how busy we are? I’m backlogged months on toxicology, fingerprints, DNA. Nearly a thousand deep right now in unreleased specimens. If the chief hadn’t signed off on this, you’d be waiting months.”

“Exactly.”

“‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘Fuck me,’ I says.” From the high volume and theatrical inflection of his voice, she suspects he is the type of person who talks with his hands, and she imagines one of them karate-chopping the air now. “You’re cutting the line! And you’re making me look bad doing so.”

“Do you have the results or not?”

“Yeah, I got the results. Why do you think I’m calling?”

“The blood was contaminated?”

“Pfft. You can say that again.”

“By what? LSD? Meth? Mushrooms?”

“Mushrooms,” he says, and his voice drops to a lower register. “But not in the way you think.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No psilocybin or psilocin.”

“Then what?”

While she waits for an answer, she sees on her office phone one, then two, then three other lines blink red with incoming calls.

10

Sometimes, when Jack and Nora were first married, his wife would lie in bed with the blankets cocooned thickly around her and refuse to speak or eat and she’d rise only to use the bathroom. These dark moments lasted for days and came once or twice a year, usually after the holidays, when the wind carried ice in it and daylight grew scarce. He tried to be there for her, bringing her water, rubbing her back, asking if there was anything he could do, but over time he grew impatient, resentful, and exhausted. She was exhausting. The same could be said for her everyday anxiety. He couldn’t understand it except in the abstract. Just snap out of it, he wanted to say. There’s no reason to obsess or worry over this, he wanted to say. Who cares if I mixed up the ordering of the pint glasses and the juice glasses in the cabinet? Who cares if I bought the regular bananas instead of an organic bunch? Who cares if the lawn hasn’t been mowed in two weeks?

“I guess we’re just too different,” she once said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to say it for me to sense it.”

“How am I supposed to even respond to that?”

“We’re just too different, and you can’t take it, and I told you that was a risk from the moment you proposed.”

“Whoa, whoa. No. That’s not what you . . . when you said we were too different . . . that has nothing to do with . . . as if this shit between us has anything to do with race? No. Definitive no.”

“We don’t match. We don’t fit.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”