“Until three,” he says.

“Can you come in at three thirty tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

She puts her hand on his upper arm, padded with the sweat shirt and flannel underneath it. He feels willowy, younger than nineteen. She fights the urge to comfort him further.

“If you don’t come,” she says.

“I’ll come,” he says.

“If you don’t,” she says, “that’ll read as suspicious. And I’ll have more of a reason to pursue an arrest.”

“I know,” he says.

She holds out her hand, businesslike, and he shakes it, more confident than she might have expected. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she tells him.

The day has felt like two days, starting in the predawn with the body in the swamp, the press conference, her trip to the morgue. At home, she stands under a hot shower for a long time, allows herself the luxury of a sweet-smelling, oily body wash, and wraps her hair in a yellow towel after. She’s dressed and drinking tea when Hurt calls.

“I thought you were meeting me,” he says.

She looks at the time on her phone. She thought he might have forgotten.

“I updated the investigation room,” he says. “And I have some details, if you want them.”

He’s still in the office. She feels a pang of guilt at having gone home, showered, begun to relax. She squeezes the towel at the base of her neck and then again at the top of her head.

“I can meet you,” she says. “It’s going to take a bit.”

He breathes into the phone in a way that makes her think he’s smiling. “You don’t have to put on makeup for me, Fisher,” he says.

“I’ll meet you at Sweetwater,” she says, droll, and hangs up.

The Sweetwater is the nicest of three bars in Spring Falls. It’s a narrow brick building from the 1800s and feels like it belongs in a bigger city. She’s gone there before, when she first started, with Hurt and Whittaker for beer and to see if she could throw darts. She can. That night she paced herself very slowly with beer. She hadn’t even felt the beginning of a buzz by the time they all left.

It’s a cold night. She dries her hair as best she can with limited time, smoothing it out with a paddle brush and the hair dryer, but it’s still wet underneath. Outside, she tries to ignore it, but she’s sure she saw flurries, floating, not landing in the air outside the bar. The bartender makes her a dark Manhattan, with two deep-red Luxardo cherries. When she takes that first sip, she thinks, I’m back at zero, the way AA teaches you. There’s no trophy for the days in between.

Hurt is already there, drinking a gin and tonic. He tries not to look at her regular clothes, her V-neck sweater and jeans, her hair, down and loose and shining. She had not put on makeup. So he looks, and doesn’t look, or looks without meeting her eye, trying not to be detected. In the dark bar, the black sweater does a decent job of hiding the fullness of her breasts, but it’s not loose. He looks down at his drink and sips.