“Are you talking about… abuse, Sam? Sherry… did what?”

“Next topic, Alan. I said what I’m going to say.”

Sometimes friendship means inquisitiveness, sometimes it means silent respect. I had a thousand questions. I asked none of them.

But Sam answered one that wasn’t even on my list. “I almost had an affair, too. Over Thanksgiving.”

I quickly catalogued the likely suspects. “Detective Reynoso?”

“Turns out we get along.”

I glanced over at him. I was checking to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “Why didn’t you?”

“Hadn’t talked to Sherry yet. But… I’ve talked to her now, so who knows? California’s not that far away. I like the beach.”

I didn’t know Sam had ever seen a beach.

“And you like Carmen?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t know how much that means. I loved Sherry. What good did it do?”

I hit the brakes to avoid running up on an old primer-covered Dodge truck that was pulling a long trailer piled high with hay.

“I’m sorry, Sam. About Sherry.”

“Ever feel like you’re playing the same music you were playing as a kid? When girls first became real? Where women are concerned, I don’t know that I’ve progressed much in thirty years.”

Sam’s words transported me back to Teri Reginelli and¡Dios mío, hay un hacha en mi cabeza!I knew that the Gibbs Storeys of the world were still capable of capturing my feet in the quicksand of my adolescence, but I desperately wanted to believe that I had developed the maturity to pull myself back out. Before I had a chance to get lost any further in that old swamp, Sam yanked me back to the present.

“You know what? Sherry and me? We had a good thing. And then one day we didn’t. It’s been bad now almost as long as it was good.”

“Simon?”

“We’ll do okay with him. We will. We’re not idiots.”

“You want to run anything by me about his reaction to all this, I’m happy to listen.”

“Yeah, thanks. If the phone doesn’t ring, that’s me.”

I laughed.

“Marriage is a weird thing. Gibbs and Sterling-what was that? All the screwing around they did. And Holly Malone? The good Catholic girl from South Bend? Her and her husband? What were they up to with their shenanigans? You and Lauren seem like you’re rock solid, but I know you’re not. God only knows what sexual perversity the two of you are into.”

I opened my mouth.

He held up his hand. “God knows, Alan-I don’t want to.”

The car lurched and hopped as we crossed two sets of railroad tracks. “You’re allowed to hit the brakes, you know, before you hit the bumps,” Sam said.

Metaphor? With Sam, I could never be quite sure. “I’ll remember that,” I said.

“I know you’re not,” he repeated. “Rock solid, I mean.”

“It’s a challenge, Sam. For us, for everybody.”

“I’m glad we agree on that. Because I don’t really want to talk about it after this.”

I said I was sorry again about him and Sherry. He pretended to ignore it.

He said, “You see the papers? They found that woman who shut down DIA. She’s from Boulder. Figures. I wouldn’t want to be her.”

Thanks to a brilliant moon the mountains were looming large against the night sky. The delta shapes of the Flatirons remained indistinct. It didn’t matter. I could feel Boulder long before I could see it.