“No,” Gilly answered firmly. “There’s no way I’m leaving you like this.”

Amos was vaguely aware of her moving away, of the murmur of voices. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back in his bed, wearing a clean T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Gillian sat on a chair beside the bed, dressed in jeans and a sweater. “How are you doing?”

“The . . . dance.”

“I told Chelsea to go without me.” She squeezed his hand. “Who else was going to take care of you?”

“Who else?” Amos said, stroking her wrist, as he drifted back to sleep.

“You’re telling me you invited Selena to the school dance?” Jordan was yelling by now, an ugly vein pounding in the center of his forehead. His son, and his former private investigator. His former lover.

He and Selena had always worked well together-when the situation in question was a professional one. Their minds ran on the same track; their blood heated to a boil at the thought of a challenging case. But all that had changed a year ago in Bainbridge, New Hampshire, when Jordan had defended a boy accused of murdering his teenage girlfriend. He’d done the unprecedented-had let his job get under his skin. And the moment that line had blurred, so had the one between him and Selena. That case had almost killed him; Selena had been the one who nearly struck the final blow.

“I didn’t have anything to do tonight,” Selena said, grinning at Thomas. “I always promised him I’d go to the prom, but then I heard about this Chelsea girl and realized desperate measures need to be taken. We’re gonna show them, aren’t we, Thomas? Can’t be too many freshmen who’ll show up with seventy-two inches of mouth-watering dark chocolate on their arm!”

“Can we back up? Can someone tell me how after months of no communication whatsoever, you managed to waltz back into our lives?”

“First things first,” Selena said. “You left me behind. Second, my whereabouts were never a secret. You know damn well I’ve never had a publicly listed residential phone number. It seems to me that if you looked half as hard as you do to find evidence for acquittal, you could have found me in less than ten minutes.”

“That’s about what it took,” Thomas agreed, shrugging. “Over the Internet.”

Sinking down on the couch, Jordan covered his face with his hands. “You’re twenty-three years older than Thomas.”

“God, Dad, this isn’t a date date. Is that why you’re losing it? You’re jealous?”

“No, I am not jealous. I just can’t imagine that bringing Selena to your school dance is any less jarring than, for example, wearing that tie we were talking about.”

Selena elbowed Thomas. “Hermès silk can’t move as smooth as I can on a dance floor-isn’t that right?”

Thomas laughed. “Just as long as you don’t curse me if I dump you for Chelsea.”

“Honey, are you kidding? That’s the whole point.”

Jordan stood. “Okay. Okay! If you two want to act like . . . like children, be my guest. But I don’t have to stand here and listen to the woman who ruined my life cavort with my son as if nothing ever happened in the first place!” He stormed out of the living room, and a moment later the door to his bedroom slammed shut.

“Who’s acting like the child?” said Thomas.

Selena smirked. “I didn’t think we were cavorting, per se. Did you?”

“Not in the least.”

She lifted Thomas’s arm and crooked it so that she could slip her hand through. “You didn’t tell him I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight, did you?”

Grinning, Thomas shook his head. “Nope.”

“Do you think you ought to mention it? So he has time to work through his fit before we come home?”

Thomas nodded, and then on second thought, shook his head. “A little mystery never hurts,” he said.

Wes knew that some of the officers who pulled shifts at the high school dances liked to pull low their hats and stare at the nubile girls from beneath the brims-the fluid curves and candy-glitter makeup a guilty pleasure. In his opinion, though, the ones that bore watching were the young boys. They’d push and shove at each other with their thick, sloped shoulders, take slight over whose foot fell first on a block of brick, raise their voices just to be heard-these were children’s minds, trapped in the bodies of men.

“Ten bucks says that kid in the Abercrombie & Fitch hat throws a punch before the hour’s out,” Wes said, leaning toward Charlie Saxton. It was strange to see him decked out like an officer; usually, as the squad’s detective, he wore plain clothes beneath his shield.

“Last time I checked, Wes, betting was against the law in New Hampshire.”

“It’s an expression.”

Charlie glanced dismissively at him. “Thank you, Mr. Pop Culture.”

“Hey, it’s the patrol officers who know what’s really going on in this town.” He was bursting with his knowledge, desperate to tell. “You ever hear of a Jack St. Bride?”

Charlie sighed. “Aw, goddammit. Yeah, I have. He came in to register.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. And I fucked up. I was going to send out a memo to everyone and somehow lost track of it.”

The wind had gone out of Wes’s sails. “So you knew about him.”

“Yeah.”

“Sexual assault.”

Charlie nodded. “It was plea-bargained down from rape.”

“And you know that he’s living in Salem Falls now.”

“Ex-cons have to live somewhere. You can’t round ’em up and stick ’em on a reservation.”

“We don’t have to roll out a welcome mat, either,” Wes said.

Charlie turned, shielding the conversation from public view. “I didn’t just hear you say that, you understand?”

Chagrined, Wes nodded. Charlie outranked him. “I still think people have the right to know someone’s a jerk before they get involved with him.”

Charlie stifled a smile. “Gotta admit, that policy could come in handy.”

“I’m glad you think this is so funny. Let’s see how hard you’re laughing the first time one of these girls is sitting across from you with her clothes torn, crying because she happened to have the bad luck to cross paths with St. Bride.”

Charlie opened his mouth to respond, but the boy in the Abercrombie & Fitch hat punched one of the other kids. “Ten bucks,” he murmured, and followed Wes through a sea of slack-jawed teens to do his job.

Thomas could feel the weight of a hundred pairs of eyes on his shoulders as he rocked back and forth on the dance floor with Selena. She stood a full head taller than he, which made it awkward, since his face was pressed up against her breasts, and he was a guy after all, so of course he couldn’t get that fact out of his mind, even if it was just Selena.

But nobody else knew that. A senior-one who’d stuffed him in a locker for the hell of it last month-had come over to ask if that was really Tyra Banks. Another wanted to know the going rate for an escort service these days. But that wasn’t nearly as rewarding as knowing that Chelsea was watching. He’d seen her standing off to the side of the gym with two of the three girls she usually hung with, the look on her face almost comical.

Thomas lifted his face to Selena’s. “If you kiss me, I’ll give you all the money in my college fund.”

Selena laughed out loud. “Thomas, honey, Bill Gates couldn’t pay me enough to kiss you here in the middle of a dance floor. On the one hand, see all those cops? I’m not about to be locked up for statutory rape. On the other hand, it’s just plain creepy. You’re like a nephew or something.”

The music ended, a faint sappy warbling. Selena patted Thomas’s cheek. “How about you stay here and make up stories about how you met me, while I get us some punch?”

She walked off, her perfect ass twitching beneath the silk tube of her dress. And that wasn’t even the most attractive part of Selena-there was her sense of humor, her sharp mind, and the way she’d yell at schoolyard bullies who killed slugs for the hell of it or kicked sand up into the faces of toddlers. Shit, Thomas thought. If he’d been his father, he would have chained her to the bed.