Page 202 of What We Bury

“So it’s not about you. It was never about you. It’s about the fact that if I lose that job—if some parent hears a rumor, if Amy says the wrong thing to the wrong person, if anyone looks too closely—then the anchor is gone. And I don’t know who I am without it.” He drops his hands. Looks at me with a rawness that makes my chest ache. “I’m afraid of that, Sage. I’m afraid of what I’ll become if there’s nothing left to keep this inside me.”

I don’t move. I don’t speak. I let it settle between us, because he’s earned that—the space to say the worst thing he’s everthought out loud and not have someone rush to fill the silence with reassurance.

“You’re not a monster, Eli,” I say eventually.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. Monsters don’t worry about becoming monsters. They justare.” I take a step toward him. Just one. “You feel joy when bad men die. So do I.” The admission tastes like metal. “I don’t know what that makes us. Broken, maybe. Dangerous, definitely. But not empty. Not nothing.”

He stares at me, jaw working. Abruptly he pushes off the counter and walks to the door.

“Eli.”

He stops, hand on the knob.

“For what it’s worth? Those kids are lucky. Whatever you think is inside you—they see through it to the real you. And so do I.”

He doesn’t turn around. But I see his shoulders rise and fall with a breath that shudders through him, and his knuckles go white on the doorknob before he twists it open and slips out without another word.

I stand in the kitchen and press my fingers to my lips where I can still feel him. The taste of his mouth. The way he shook. The sound he made when his wall came down.

I asked to be included, and he shut the door.

Then he shut himself out, too.

Tears slide down my face.

I don’t want this.

Fuck.

FIFTY-FIVE

HOLDEN

Iarrive for bowling twenty minutes early, because I’m a cop and I don’t walk into rooms blind.

Then I sit in the car a second and read the sign. GLENVIEW LAWN BOWLS CLUB. EST. 1962. NEW MEMBERS & SOCIAL PLAYERS WELCOME. There’s a word in there I keep snagging on.

Lawn.

I get out. There’s no alley. No neon. Just a flat green rectangle mowed within an inch of its life, ringed by a little trench and lit by Sunday afternoon light harsh enough to make the whole place look like a denture commercial. There’s a clubhouse with hanging baskets, sensible sedans in the lot, and a bumper sticker that says I’D RATHER BE AT BOWLS beside a graphic of balls that are very much not bowling balls.

I’m going to kill Milo.

And there are people. Maybe thirty of them, mostly in whites and wide-brimmed hats, holding drinks and moving at the unhurried pace of a generation with nowhere to be and allday to not be there. The youngest person on that green has grandchildren. Adult grandchildren.

I do the math on the exits without thinking: two doors on the clubhouse, one gate at the green. I clock the camera over the bar pointed at the till, the woman selling raffle tickets, and the man asleep in a deck chair who may or may not be alive.

Then I stop, because there’s nothing here to clock. No threat under seventy, unless you count blood pressure.

Milo booked us lawn bowls.

My phone buzzes. Knox.

KNOX:

She’s at the café on Third with the roommate. Public. Two exits. I’ve got the undertaker on the door.