“Hold up. What?! This is a joke, right? It’s gotta be a joke.”

“Sh! Come on, Elsie, you’re like, yelling.”

“Of course, I’m yelling! I’m pretty sure you would be yelling, too. You know, if you were me.”

“Nope. Not me.”

“Um, sorry girlfriend, but I call bullshit. In fact, I’m pretty sure you did yell. When you found out about me and Caleb and that we were really a thing? You totally yelled. So I’m not doing anything out of the ordinary.”

“That was completely different! You two were a couple, Elsie. This isn’t a date. It’s not even close to a date.”

“Oh really? Interesting. Tell me then, what do we usually call it when a guy and a girl go out together to get drinks? I feel like there’s a name for that, but since you’re saying it can’t be called a date, I’m not too sure what I should be calling it…?”

“I swear, Elsie,” Clara answered through her fit of giggles, looking around her every other second to make sure that Weston didn’t walk up on her in the middle of having this conversation. “It’s nothing like that. He’s just coming to talk to me about my case.”

“Right, fill me in on that again? Last time I checked you didn’t have a case. They weren’t even willing to entertain the idea that something was actually up. You know, because they’re psychotic.”

So Clara, who hadn’t yet actually told her friend exactly what had happened the night before, gave her an abbreviated rundown. She felt strange talking about it, like she wasn’t exactly sure she wanted to give the details not only to Elsie but to anyone. As much as she was denying it at the moment, there was just sort of something about Weston. She had seen something different about him when he’d been in her apartment that first awful night with Bo, but that had been something she could forget with relative ease.

It had been easy to reason with herself that he had only seemed alright in comparison to the jackass that was his partner. It wasn’t until last night that she’d realized there was something about him. Not something about him in comparison to somebody else, but something about who he was inside of himself. She could feel his sadness, a sadness tinged with a deep anger she could only begin to imagine the origins of. There was something electric about him, something she felt drawn to in a way she had rarely been with anyone in her life.

It would be a lie if she said that there was no part of her that had wondered what it would be like to feel his hand caress her face, to feel his lips on hers and his strong arms folding her up so close to him that she could feel his heart beating against her own. It would be a lie, and one she could not tell herself convincingly. That didn’t mean she couldn’t tell it to Elsie, however, and tell it was exactly what she did. Because she wasn’t a very good liar she told it quickly and then hung up the phone, begging off to meet the man she was claiming not to be attracted to. She went inside, ordered a glass of wine, and waited. She didn’t have to wait long. Only ten minutes after she’d gotten her drink, she saw Weston walk through the front door, looking painfully handsome in a pair of dark slacks and a short-sleeve, button-up shirt that hugged his body so that she could see how incredibly muscular he was underneath it.

“Stop it!” Her mind screamed at her so loudly she was practically sure the people around her could hear it, too. “What the hell is the matter with you? He’s coming here to help you figure out who’s messing with you, that’s all! Get your mind out of the gutter!”

“Clara?”

“Yes!” She answered him a little too loudly for it to be appropriate for the hushed setting of the bar he’d asked her to meet him at. “Sorry. Yes, hi. I don’t know why I’m so jumpy right now.”

“I can’t say that I’m surprised. I think it’d have to be a hard person to deal with the shit you’ve seen and not be freaked out.”

“I guess so. I don’t know.”

“Is this place alright, by the way? It’s nothing like Frankie’s place, but it’s a hell of a lot closer to my place. It’s been kind of a long day, and I didn’t want to get to far away.”

“Sure, it’s pretty. Swanky, I guess you could call it. I didn’t know this was your neighborhood. Somehow I thought you were still in the old neighborhood. I thought you still lived near that bar.”

“No, not anymore. My parents place is still there. I own it, technically, but I don’t go there so much these days. Don’t see much of a reason.”

Clara nodded, not wanting to speak for fear of alerting Weston to the fact that he was revealing things about himself and causing him to stop talking. She had a feeling he didn’t really mean to be telling her anything real, and the information that he was currently the owner of his childhood home but saw no reason to go back to it definitely told her something about him. It told her that she had been right in her belief that he’d suffered loss the way that she had and that there were reasons other than habit that kept him going back to the neighborhood. The other thing it told her was that she wanted to know more. There was this annoying little voice in the back of her head that seemed to be getting louder all of the time that told her there was something special about this man and that if she wasn’t careful she would never get the chance to find out what that was. It was crazy to even think about anything like this with all of the other turmoil going on in her life at the moment, but thinking about it was something she couldn’t seem to stop doing. She was even starting to wonder if, as insane as it sounded, she was going to say something to him that was totally out of character for her. She might have done it, too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he beat her to the punch and spoke first. That, and then there was the matter of what he had to say.

“So look, there’s no easy way for me to tell you this.”

“Uh oh. That doesn’t sound good. Did you find something? Something bad? Because honestly, I expected something bad so it would need to be really bad for me to be upset by it. By whatever you need to tell me, I mean.”

“No, Clara. It’s not something I found. I didn’t find anything.”

“Well, that's okay,” Clara answered uncertainly, trying hard to stay some kind of positive but finding it more and more difficult with each passing second. “It’s not like there was a guarantee. You said that, didn’t you? About the fingerprints? You said there was only a chance that they would already be in the system. You warned me.”

“I did. That’s not what I’m talking about right now.”

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t help you, Clara. I know I told you that I could, but I can’t.”

She realized then that part of her had known he was going to say something like that from the moment he’d called her earlier that day. She hadn’t wanted to believe it and so she’d busied herself with a thousand little distractions in order not to think about it, as if a refusal to do so would somehow remove this obstacle altogether. Now, here it was again, rearing its ugly head and coming at her with full force. All of the sudden, she felt very tired herself. She felt all of the sleepless nights of the last two weeks and the night before in which she had not slept at all. She felt those things, and she wanted to tell him not to go any further, or at least to beg him to hit the pause button on life so that he could give her this information another time, a time when she felt less breakable and vulnerable. She wanted to grab the remote and put everything on pause. She wanted to do it more desperately than she had ever wanted anything in her life, and yet she found that she could not say a single thing.