“Gee, I appreciate that.” He handed her a beer, and as she took it, their fingers brushed lightly. Miles swallowed.

Damn, she was pretty. Up close, even more so.

Before he could think about it any further, there was a slight commotion behind him. Miles turned at the sound.

“So how are you two doing, Deputy Ryan?”

He tensed automatically at Otis Timson’s question. Otis’s brother was standing just behind him, holding a beer, his eyes glassy. Otis gave Sarah a mock salute, and she took a small step away from Otis, toward Miles. “And how areyou doing? Nice to see you again.”

Miles followed Otis’s eyes toward Sarah.

“He was the guy I told you about earlier,” she whispered.

Otis raised his eyebrows at that but said nothing.

“What the hell do you want, Otis?” Miles said warily, remembering what Charlie had told him.

“I don’t want anything,” Otis answered. “I just wanted to say hello.”

Miles turned away. “Do you want to go to the bar?” he asked Sarah.

“Sure,” she agreed.

“Yeah, go ahead. I don’t want to keep you from your date,” Otis said. “You got a nice gal, there,” he said. “Looks like you’ve found someone new.” Miles flinched, and Sarah saw how much the comment stung. Miles opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. His hands balled into fists, but instead he took a deep breath and turned to Sarah.

“Let’s go,” he said. His tone reflected a rage she’d never heard before. “Oh, by the way,” Otis added. “The whole thing with Harvey? Don’t worry too much about it. I asked him to go easy on you.”

A crowd, sensing trouble, was beginning to gather. Miles stared hard at Otis, who returned the gaze without moving. Otis’s brother had moved off to the side, as if getting ready to jump in if he needed to.

“Let’s just go,” Sarah said a little more forcefully, doing her best to keep this from getting any more out of hand. She took Miles by the arm and tugged. “Come on… please, Miles,” she pleaded.

It was enough to get his attention. Sarah grabbed both their jackets, stowing them under her arm as she pulled him through the crowd. People parted before them, and a minute later they were outside. Miles shook her hand from his arm, angry at Otis, angry at himself for almost losing control, and stalked down the alley, out toward the street. Sarah followed a few steps behind, pausing to put her jacket on.

“Miles… wait…”

It took a moment for the words to sink in, and Miles finally stopped, looking toward the ground. When she approached, holding out his jacket, Miles didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m sorry about all that,” he said, unable to meet her eyes. “You didn’t do anything, Miles,” she said. When he didn’t respond, Sarah moved closer. “Are you okay?” she asked softly.

“Yeah… I’m okay.” His voice was so low that she barely heard it. For a moment, he looked exactly like Jonah when she assigned too much work. “You don’t look okay,” she finally said. “In fact, you look pretty terrible.” Despite his anger, he laughed under his breath. “Thanks a lot.” On the street, a car rolled by, looking for a parking space. A cigarette sailed out the window, landing in the gutter. It was colder now, too cold to stay in one place, and Miles reached for his jacket and slipped it on. Without a word, they set off down the street. Once they reached the corner, Sarah broke the silence.

“Can I ask what that was all about in there?”

After a long moment, Miles shrugged. “It’s a long story.”

“They usually are.”

They took a few steps, their footsteps the only sound on the streets.

“We have a history,” Miles finally offered. “Not a very good one.”

“I picked up on that part,” she said. “I’m not exactly dense, you know.”

Miles didn’t respond.

“Look, if you’d rather not talk about it…”

It offered Miles a way out, and he almost took her up on it. Instead, however, he pushed his hands into his pockets and closed his eyes for a long moment. Over the next few minutes, he told Sarah everything-about the arrests over the years, the vandalism in and around his home, the cut on Jonah’s cheek-ending with the latest arrest and even Charlie’s warning. As he talked, they wound back through downtown, past the closed-up businesses and the Episcopal church, finally crossing Front Street and heading into the park at Union Point. Through it all, Sarah listened quietly. When he was finished, she looked up at him. “I’m sorry I stopped you,” she said quietly. “I should have let you beat him to a pulp.”

“No, I’m glad you did. He’s not worth it.”

They passed the old women’s club, once a quaint meeting place but long since abandoned, and the ruins of the building seemed to encourage silence, almost as if they were in a cemetery. Years of flooding by the Neuse had rendered the building all but uninhabitable except for birds and other assorted wildlife. Once Miles and Sarah neared the riverbank, they stopped to stare at the tar-colored water of the Neuse drifting slowly before them. Water slapped against the marlstone along the banks in a steady rhythm. “Tell me about Missy,” she said finally, breaking the stillness that had settled over them.

“Missy?”

“I’d like to know what she was like,” she said honestly. “She’s a big part of who you are, but I don’t know anything about her.”

After a moment, Miles shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Well… what do you miss the most?”

Across the river, a mile distant, he could see flickering porch lights, bright pinpricks in the distance that seemed to hang in the air like fireflies on hot summer nights.

“I miss having her around,” he began. “Just being there when I got off work, or waking up beside her, or seeing her in the kitchen or out in the yard-anywhere. Even if we didn’t have much time, there was something special in knowing that she would be there if I needed her. And she would have been. We’d been married long enough to go through all those stages that married people go through-the good, the not so good, even the bad-and we’d settled into something that worked for both of us. We were both kids when we started out, and we knew people who got married around the same time we did. After seven years, a lot of friends had divorced and a few had already gotten remarried.” He turned from the river to face her. “But we made it, you know? I look back on that, and it’s something that I’m proud of, because I know how rare it was. I never regretted the fact that I’d married her. Never.”

Miles cleared his throat.

“We used to spend hours just talking about everything, or about nothing. It didn’t really matter. She loved books and she used to tell me all the stories she was reading, and she could do it in a way that made me want to read them, too. I remember she used to read in bed and sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and she’d be sound asleep with the book on the end table with her reading light still on. I’d have to get out of bed to turn it off. That happened more often after Jonah was born-she was tired all the time, but even then, she had a way of acting like she wasn’t. She was wonderful with him. I remember when Jonah started trying to walk. He was about seven months old, which is way too early. I mean, he couldn’t even crawl yet, but he wanted to walk. She spent weeks walking through the house all bent over so he could hold her fingers, just because he liked it. She’d be so sore in the evenings that unless I gave her a massage, she wouldn’t be able to move the next day. But you know…” He paused, meeting Sarah’s eyes.

“She never complained about it. I think it was what she was meant to do. She used to tell me that she wanted to have four kids, but after Jonah, I kept coming up with excuses why it wasn’t the right time, until she finally put her foot down. She wanted Jonah to have brothers and sisters, and I realized that I did, too. I know from experience how hard it is to be an only child, and I wish I’d listened to her earlier. For Jonah, I mean.”