Archive of Our Own

Sadie knew full well that the cliche was hating your ex, or at least seriously side-eyeing them–but then, she’d never been one to follow expectations. It had been six years now since she and Jake divorced, and four years since he met Eliza, and two years since the two of them had to delay their wedding thanks to the pandemic.

All at once, the day was here, and she’d had time, yes, and she’d made her peace with the knowledge that she and Jake would always love each other, but they’d become very different people from those small-town sweethearts. Made peace with knowing he’d moved on and found someone new, and it would be her by his side as his wife. Listening to all his plans for Ambarino–God, she’d been there when it was a food truck in Colorado, rather than a Miami restaurant with a Michelin star. Even before that, when it was just a dream, when Jake was scared to tell his parents that his working in a restaurant during college turned into something else, that he aimed to use his business degree for something entirely different than their hopes of their only child having the financial and job security they’d lacked. Eliza hadn’t been there for that like Sadie had, but it didn’t matter. She was there for his present and future, the man he was now, the man he’d become. Waking up with him. Reaping the benefit of being with a man who loved to wake up and make breakfast. Putting up with endless reruns of Frasier.

She’d made her peace with it. Or at least she thought she had.

It wasn’t that she wanted Jake back. She wanted him happy, and oh, he was happy, holding his new wife, beaming that smile of his at her.

She could also try to hate Eliza Morgan–Eliza Adler now, she supposed, assuming she’d change her name. But that wouldn’t fly either. They hadn’t met in person, but they’d chatted some. She seemed nice. It was damn hard to hate a kindergarten teacher to begin. And she’d seen that Jake seemed so happy, but seeing Jake with her today…she could make him smile like that again. That said everything. She couldn’t hate Eliza. Couldn’t blame her, make her into some man-stealing bitch, even if she’d wanted that.

No, it wasn’t that she wanted Jake back. It was the fact of sitting there at her ex’s wedding, and the curious dull ache of seeing he’d moved on. That happiness that pounded home the reality that it wasn’t her that gave him that joy. Not any longer. They’d called it quits for that reason, among others, and accepted it. But he’d moved forward, and here she was, the ex-wife, still one of his best friends, still stuck in the same rut.

Sometimes she thought there was a big part of her that died the day the O’Driscolls shot her, and killed Sean, seven years back now. That if she went back to that cabin in the Colorado woods with all her equipment for the thing that was assuredly not her day job, if she wouldn’t find some echo there of herself. Still there, still haunting the place. A Sadie Adler that had once been, and now wasn’t.

She wondered if Sean was still there too. He’d died with plenty of things left unfinished, including a daughter he’d never met. Karen had asked Sadie to be little Bridget’s godmother, and the kid was blessed, or cursed, with her father’s flaming red Irish hair. Chances were some of his spirit lingered. Much like her partner had been in life, she suspected his ghost probably just would not shut up. The thought made her smile, though it was the kind of sad smile that came with an edge of tears.

“You look like you’re enjoying this wedding just about as much as me.” Caught out of her thoughts by a deep voice speaking up, she looked over to the man sitting down at her table. Tall, broad build, green eyes. Hair that she suspected told her he didn’t live here in Miami either, because that middle-of-the-road dark blond or light brown would have brightened to gold in the fierce Florida sun. A twanging drawl with its roots in the deserts of the Southwest that sounded somewhat like her New Mexico childhood, but something else sprinkled in there too.

Something about his bearing, the way he carried himself, seemed familiar. “Cop?” she asked.

He shook his head, leaning back in his chair, taking a sip of his drink. “Marines.” He raised a finger as if to make sure she caught the next word. “Former.”

That made sense of it, although in her experience, most Marines claimed there was no such thing as a former Marine. But she hadn’t been a cop for close to a dozen years for nothing. Learned to read plenty about people without them saying a thing. Saw the way his eyes strayed to Jake and Eliza, the half-hid wistful smile, the sudden sag to his shoulders. It said plenty.

Suspicion tickled at her. She’d never seen a picture of them, of course. Probably much like how she’d carefully tucked away her and Jake’s wedding picture. Eliza had mentioned getting married when she was still in undergrad and her now-ex-husband had just graduated as a Marine from the Naval Academy, when she and Sadie were chatting a few weeks ago on Skype about Sadie’s flight from Philadelphia.

So she struggled to imagine the man sitting there at twenty-two or so, softer featured and probably skinnier, frame less filled out. Nearly twenty years made a difference, but it was mostly the hair. The mental jump to his sporting a military high-and-tight rather than now with his hair grown out to the point it could almost be deemed shaggy was a big one. Most retired Marines she’d ever met still tended towards that look. This guy? Between that and his not being clean shaven, he looked almost nothing like a former jarhead.

Well, OK, he’d worn blue today. Though it wasn’t the dark blue of the Marine dress uniform. A mid-blue button-down with subtle striping a shade or two darker. Another sign he wasn’t from around here, in that he’d worn a tie to begin–a black one, now hanging over the back of his chair. The local Florida boys apparently knew better, and had arrived with collars open and sleeves rolled up in the late August heat and humidity. As for her, she’d left the lightweight white cardigan she usually wore over this teal plaid sundress over the back of her chair. It was hot to wear it outside, but better that today than getting sunburn and even more freckles in the end.

She took a guess. “So…you’re Eliza’s ex-husband? Uh, Adam Morgan?” It had started with “A”, she remembered that.

He raised his glass in mock salute. “Eliza’s ex-husband, Arthur Morgan.” His smile deepened, taking on an even more rueful edge. “A real detective, huh? Ah, shit. And you asked if I was a cop. Don’t tell me I’m addressing Mrs. Adler the First?”

She raised a hand in acknowledgement, lacking a drink of her own. “Mrs. Adler the First. Sadie. Cop...former.”

“Never got your first name before, I’m afraid. Talked with Jake a little, of course. But not like that’s a topic you bring up with your ex’s new fiance, you know?”

“I imagine not.”

He glanced at the empty glass in front of her, the ice slowly melting in the heat. “Open bar at least. You want me to get you another drink?”

“I was thinking of getting out of here, to be honest.” Some people were having to leave the reception already anyhow. She was happy for Jake. Truly, genuinely happy for him. But right now, it felt like she needed to be happy from a little distance for the sake of her own lonely, aching heart.

Not like every ghost could be detected by an EMF meter, after all. Some just stayed in the mind and the heart. The ghost of the failed marriage of Jake and Sadie Adler, of a Sadie Griffith Adler that no longer existed, was being a bit too noisy right now for her to bear. Too bad she couldn’t call in the right materials and ritual to banish it.

Arthur Morgan, ex-Marine, ex-husband, pitched back the rest of his drink in about ten seconds. “Great. I was about ready to head out myself. Mind if I go with you a bit? I’m at the Holiday Inn down the street. Short walk. Bar next door has good burgers, if you’re interested.”

She was staying at the same hotel, and was familiar with the excellent burgers at Pearson’s. And she’d had just about enough bittersweet memories for the day. Right now, not eating the lemon dill salmon that she’d planned to order, thinking the nostalgia of one of Ambarino’s signatures being something Jake used to cook for her would be nice, sounded great.

But she eyed Arthur Morgan, suddenly suspicious. He put up his hands, fingers spread, in a gesture of protesting surrender. “Jesus. OK, let’s get something straight. No funny business. I don’t do wedding hookups. I really don’t do drunk wedding hookups. I absolutely don’t do drunk wedding hookups with my ex-wife’s new husband’s ex-wife–shit, that’s a mouthful.”

“Does that make me your ex-wife once removed?” she couldn’t resist the sudden wisecrack. Something about how awkward and flustered he was in the denial seemed all too genuine. No, her apparent ex-husband once removed really wasn’t looking for the angle of a few drinks together and then slyly suggesting some mutual consoling up in his room.

Though she wouldn’t be surprised if he had. She knew wedding hookups really were a common enough thing. Seemed a little sad to her, to be honest, someone else’s happiness driving a person into someone’s arms to just to not feel alone. That felt the only way she could see it happening. But apparently others didn’t view it like that. Abigail Roberts, one of her closest friends, had more than once accused Sadie of being a wedding killjoy. It’s just supposed to be a bit of fun. Because weddings are supposed to be fun, Sadie. Not some depressing mini existential crisis.

Seemed Abby had taken it upon herself to nudge, or more like shove, Sadie in that direction. When she’d unpacked her suitcase, she’d found a box of condoms, a tube of pineapple-flavored lube, and a note from Abby saying “Especially for this wedding, just find someone cute and go have some fun. Chin up, girl.” It was thoughtful, in Abby’s bold, no-nonsense way, but Sadie had sighed all the same, shoving the condoms and lube underneath her very cute cartoon animal print not-at-all-aimed-towards-a-hookup underwear.

Arthur laughed at her joke, and it was more than a polite chuckle. “Guess it does.” Then he sobered again, nodding towards Jake and Eliza. “It’s good to see them happy. But it’s their future. They don’t need old ghosts lingering too long, you know what I mean?”

She knew exactly what he meant by that. Jake hadn’t said as such, but he’d more or less hinted he completely understood if she didn’t want to stay the whole time. Sweet of him, as usual. “No. They don’t.” She stood up, grabbed her cardigan, giving one last glance towards Jake. Wish you nothing but the best, Jake, I truly do. “Let’s go.”

He grabbed his tie, stuffed it in the pocket of his pants–after folding it neatly, apparently still a meticulous Marine in some ways–and gestured in an after you way.

Given she had figured she’d end up drinking alone at Pearson’s anyway, this was more or less still following the same roadmap. Just with like-minded company. It was only about a five minute walk, and given the bustling flow of people out enjoying yet another sunny southern Florida Saturday, it spared her trying to come up with small talk on the way there.

Seated at a booth, she ordered another Crown and Coke, and a cheeseburger. Ordering done, their waiter having gone away to punch it in, there was nothing to do now but turn back to the man across from her. Time to get the boring basics out of the way, and see if there was actually anything of substance to talk about after that. “So where you coming in from?”

“I live up near Baltimore. You?”

“Outside of Philly.”

“And where originally?”

“Near Roswell. Little town that’s barely a dot on the map.” Maybe that was where the fascination with mysteries began, both mundane and otherwise. “Yourself?”

“Moved around a good bit.” He shrugged. “Lived near Flagstaff until I was eleven and my father went away to prison for life. My mom had already died in a car crash, and after that, I spent a couple of years on the road as the foster kid of a scam artist. I was the first, but he took in a few of us. So me, my brother John, and my sister Tilly, got real good at sob stories at fake charity fundraisers, until dear old Daddy Dutch got arrested, and the three of us got packed off to, hm, more stable homes. Or at least ones less likely to end up as a Lifetime movie.”

She looked at him, raising her eyebrows, judging he was serious. “You always drop that bomb on people when you first meet them?”

“Sometimes." He gave her a wry smile. “Best to get it out of the way early, I find. The Lifetime movie’s meh at best, by the way. Thankfully, at least they changed all our names.” Yes, they would have. He studied her, taking a sip of his Jack and Coke, obviously trying to judge how much he’d thrown her. She had the feeling he possibly liked seeing how much someone could handle by putting something like that right out front immediately. Also acting casual about it, like he didn’t give a damn.

She played ball right back. “I wouldn’t give Lifetime too much credit for that. The court already concealed your names first, as you were still minors. But then, you already knew that.” He raised an eyebrow, looking at her with interest. “You forget–I was a cop. I’ve seen plenty of shit.” Yeah, like she hadn’t seen too many kids from lousy situations trying to shrug too, making their nonchalance about traumatic things into their armor. Like she hadn’t done the same herself these past years. She knew exactly what he was doing, and it just made her a little sad for him.

“Oh, right, Ms. Law and Order. See, you’d have been really pissed off with me as a teenager. I was an angry little juvenile delinquent after that. Stole a car, got arrested, ended up sent to military school, and it worked. Seems all I needed was some discipline.” Apparently it had stuck, given his going to Annapolis and joining the Marines as an adult. He must have made an impressive turnaround in military school too, given any juvenile record alone was a possible reason to be disqualified from the military, let alone the prestige of the Naval Academy.

“Well, I hope that’s not a creepy invitation to discipline you later.” Pushing at him too, seeing how much he could handle. She never could respect someone who crumpled like wet paper.

“Like I said, Ex-Wife Once Removed. Wedding hookups aren’t my kind of fun.”

“So what is your kind of fun? Bowling? Morris dancing? World of Warcraft?”

“Paranormal investigation.” He looked at her, and she had the oddest sense that he was looking quickly for her reaction, and whether or not to pass it off as a joke. Ha ha, you thought I was serious? Nah, I’m all about fantasy football, of course.

She did think he was serious, actually. Which made it easier on her to show her own cards. “So, would I find you over on Discord at POISE?” Also known as the Paranormal and Occult Investigation Server. Nobody had ever quite explained where the E at the end of the acronym came from. But it was a place she’d spent probably far too much time these past few years, but it felt like that world was all too often the only one that made some sense of things.

He stared at her in earnest then, given she’d just offered him the Internet-era version of a secret handshake, and something in his expression eased, his eyes lighting up with excitement. “No kidding? I’ve met a few people off there agreeing to do a job together, but got to say this is the first time I met someone just by chance.”

“No kidding.” It was a big enough worldwide server to not know everybody on it, even in passing. Big enough that even being less than two hours away from each other meant their investigative circles hadn’t crossed.

He nodded at that, finger tracing the line of the water ring his sweating glass made on the nicked and scratched wood table. Pearson’s was the kind of bar that didn’t bother with niceties like coasters. She noticed he idly drew it into a protection sign against evil, the motion well practiced. So, Ex-Husband Once Removed dealt with some dangerous entities to boot, rather than just chasing harmless little shades or spirits to enthrall tourists. “It always seems to be the people who’ve seen some shit, you know?”

She knew what he meant. Felt like a lot of paranormally-inclined folks were ones with some kind of pain in their past. “Guess you have to have some ghosts of your own in order to sense them.”

“Yeah, well, we’re even crazier. I expect you’re the sort who goes chasing down ones that are a threat.”

“Oh?”

He smiled at her, a casual knowing smile, but there was a warmth to it and in his eyes that kept it far from smugness and turned it instead into a sort of understanding intimacy. “Cop. Protect and serve doesn’t stop when you put away the badge, I imagine.”

“Neither does defending against all enemies after you hang up your uniform. Though it’s probably not quite the kind you had in mind.”

“Semper fi. Loyalty means something. It was about the only thing that mattered to me for a long time, until I figured out it’s about being loyal to what matters. You need to be true to something, or else what the hell’s the point? So, Detective–”

“Sergeant, actually. And what ex-rank would I call you, anyway?”

“Major.” He shrugged. “Look, after I got promoted from lieutenant, I figured I was screwed. I had to stay in to make major just to not be ‘Captain Morgan’ any more, right? The rum jokes get old pretty fast.”

She had to laugh at that, shaking her head in amusement. “I notice you’re a Jack and Coke man. So, what, no rum at all?”

“Nah, I like a good fruity tropical drink as much as the next guy, at least on vacation. Thought it’s been…” Something in him drew closed, the gleam of humor wiped from his eyes, lips drawing into a tight line, and he looked away from her.

She knew that look immediately. “Last time you went was with Eliza, I’m guessing.” Back when she was still Mrs. Morgan, rather than Mrs. Adler the Second. Presumably the sequel that improved upon the original.

“Jamaica, right after I got out of the Marines. We both figured a vacation would do us some good to fix things.” He gave a shrug that strove for being easily dismissive, and didn’t pass muster at all, a tight and awkward gesture. “Didn’t.”

“Yeah, Jake and I went to the Bahamas, after I got retired. Didn’t help. It was all waiting for us right inside the front door when we got back.”

Arthur looked up at her then, and she could see his eyes narrow in thought, and realized he was sharp enough to have caught the slip of her tongue and to turn it over, analyzing it. Got retired. No, she hadn’t chosen it. But Captain Vernon Farley had put his foot down and told her to retire with honor, or get let go as medically unable to perform her job. Sadie had spun out, and the way she was going, the way with which she flung herself into the fray, the recklessness with which she treated herself and those she chased, the precinct would see another funeral the year after Sean MacGuire’s. They couldn’t take that.

The burgers came soon after which spared them from having to dissect that much more in the moment, and Sadie busied herself stuffing down the cheeseburger and garlic parmesan fries, and another Crown and Coke while she was at it. Though when she saw the DJ setting up in the back corner of the bar, she sighed. It was Saturday evening. Of course there would be karaoke. And in a little place like this, it would be impossible to escape and find a quiet corner. Some nights she might well be up for it, just letting go and singing for the sheer giddy escape of it. Tonight, she wasn’t.

Glancing across the table at her erstwhile companion, she saw he’d noticed as well. “I don’t mind a good night of fun at the bar,” he said, “but not really in the mood for it tonight.”

She wasn’t nearly drunk enough to sleep soundly tonight, though. She could feel the ghosts within trying to rise. “No. Not tonight.”

He pulled out his wallet, and with his cash down on the table, she noticed he’d paid enough for both of their bills, and a good tip besides. “Me, I’m thinking I’m taking this party to go. Find a liquor store, get a bottle, head back to my room, see what TV’s on, and maybe just pass the fuck out at some point.”

“Great plan. You got dinner, so I’ll buy the booze.” He didn’t look at her with surprise at her effectively inviting herself to their continued pity party. Apparently he didn’t want to be alone with his own thoughts either. “But,” she held up a finger, “I veto all cop dramas. Unless you want hours of me ranting about Law and Order.”

Given he was a Jack Daniels guy and she was a Crown Royal gal, they compromised at the liquor store on Jim Beam. She behaved and didn’t even snicker and nod towards the bottles of Captain Morgan rum, for which she mentally awarded herself some points. With more Coke obtained at the 7-Eleven plus some ice from the hotel’s machine, they settled into his room, becoming their own bartenders.

It turned out that there was an X-Files marathon on, and soon enough they ended up caught up in commentary. They’d both loved the show since they were young, sounded like, but they knew more now than they had as kids. There were of course points to scoff at in any ghost-based episode, things to laugh about, episodes that hadn’t aged well or hadn’t been good to begin, and things to mull over in a way that they hadn’t before.

Five, six, seven episodes? Nine? She wasn’t sure. They started to blur, the pleasant fog of Jim Beam and fatigue growing thicker. Didn’t know what time it was. All she knew was that nothing hurt–no, her sides hurt from laughing, but it was a good hurt–her eyes kept feeling heavier and heavier, and her bed was right there, so she stumbled over to it, laid down, and went right to sleep.

There was the sound of a loud thud, and years and years of unconscious instincts took over, catapulting him up and ready to respond to whatever the situation was before he even fully came awake. He might sleep soundly as anything once he got there, but certain sounds woke him up like no caffeine ever could.

Though as he got up, he didn’t find his gun nearby, ready to confront whatever danger he was in. The next realization piercing the fog of sleep was that jumping up that fast from sleeping apparently scrunched up in a chair, meant his body pretty much turned on every blaring check engine light it had, reminding him he wasn’t twenty-five any more.

The third thing was that the fog and the pain weren’t just age and awkward sleep, it was also that his head was killing him and his stomach gave a sudden lurch at having gotten up so quickly. Hangover. No question.

That priority list meant that it took him until the fourth item to realize the sound was courtesy of a glass dropping on the floor, and that it was a woman who’d done it. The hell is a woman doing in my room? What exactly had he gotten up to last night, and how drunk had he gotten? His stomach lurched in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol, sick and panicked.

Glancing at her, seeing the wheat-blond hair messed up from sleep and the teal plaid sundress, it clicked. Ah. Sadie Adler. Eliza’s new husband’s ex-wife. Or as she’d succinctly put it, his ex-wife once removed. He relaxed, at least somewhat, memories coming back to him. No, nothing had happened. Nothing except liquor and some X-Files and just the right blend of commiseration and good humor.

“Sorry,” she said, gently putting the glass on the tray near what looked like a very melted bit of ice in its container, and the very empty bottles of Coke and Jim Beam. The way she was squinting, the way she hadn’t opened the curtains to the Godawful merciless sun of a Miami morning, but instead turned on a lamp, told him her head had to be killing her too. “I was, ah, trying to clean up. And um, sorry for stealing your bed, and you sleeping in the chair.” She gestured to the bed in question.

He had a vague memory of her collapsing on it facedown, sprawled out like a starfish, and he’d just sighed at it, and grabbed one of the pillows she hadn’t trapped to make himself as comfortable as he could in the chair. “It’s nothing. I’ve slept in far worse,” he said, shrugging it off. His neck and shoulders took that shrug as a chance to remind him very, very helpfully that it had been a while.

After all, even eight years back when things between him and Eliza finally hit the point they agreed it was time to let go, he’d slept on the couch until he could find his own apartment.

She nodded at that, but he could see the twist to her mouth that spoke of her uncomfortableness with it all the same. “I’d think,” she said carefully, reaching for her purse, and slipping her sandals back on, “we both need some food just now. Nothing like a good breakfast after a little too much booze. I’m buying, don’t argue. Least I can do after stealing your bed.”

He sensed that arguing with Sadie could be its own brand of fun, but that this wasn’t the thing to take a stand on, so he just shrugged and nodded his acceptance. “Uh…don’t know how far you’re staying from here.”

“I’m in this hotel.” The unhappy cast of her mouth turned up into a wry grin. “Just down the hall, actually. 217.”

He couldn’t blame her for not telling him that. Women, fairly or not, had to be careful around a man. “Half an hour, downstairs?” That should give both of them time to clean up.

“Yeah, sounds good.” Once she was gone, he sighed at the state of his shirt, creased beyond all hope short of a good ironing. At least he’d only needed to dress nicely for one occasion on this trip. Heading for the bathroom, there was time enough for a shave and a shower and some clean clothes, thank God. After all that, he felt actually human enough again to risk opening the curtains, and given the fierce sunlight didn’t drive a spike of pure pain into his brain, apparently the hangover wasn’t too bad. Like she’d said, some food would help, and some water.

Meeting Sadie downstairs, they found a corner diner about two blocks away, the kind of family-owned greasy spoon he’d always loved. The kind where he’d met a nineteen-year-old Eliza McCready back in Annapolis, so long ago, when she’d waited on him. Even the way that all ended didn’t take away from the enjoyment of that sort of place for him.

They didn’t talk much, busy getting food in their stomachs. But as the meal ended, as she called for the check and another cup of coffee for each of them, she looked at him across the table. Amber brown eyes a bit uncertain, a feeling he recognized. What happens now?

They’d met, they’d talked, they’d had a bit of an awkwardly funny evening of getting tipsy and her passing out on his bed, and she’d bought him breakfast by way of apology. By all reasonable accounts, they could leave it at that. But there was something about her. Fellow feeling, for sure, and of course, the fact she’d picked up his own particular hobby-slash-calling especially. Left him feeling a little less alone here in Miami, and for a man who felt that loneliness all too often, he didn’t quite want to let this go. Pathetic. “When are you headed out?” she asked. “Not keeping you from the airport, am I?”

“Nah. I’m here for another couple of days. Figured if I was buying a plane ticket I’d at least make a vacation of it.” Figured, in truth, it would feel a little less sad and pitiful to stick around for a few days rather than just bounce down to Miami for Eliza’s wedding and head right back home.

“Same here. Plans for today?”

He resisted an urge to punch the air in elation. She was sticking around too? Good. Seemed like maybe that was a sign. “Didn’t make any. Truth be told, I kind of expected I’d see how I felt after the wedding.” Something he couldn’t have admitted to most people, but she’d get it. He hadn’t been sure whether he’d need to get out and distract himself, or to just sit morosely in his hotel room binge-watching TV. Probably some of both, to be honest.

“Good. Then I say let’s hit the beach. It’s what you do in Miami, right? And you can tell me all about your big bad POISE adventures.”

He found himself smiling, a bit relieved that she’d just bulled ahead with it as if there was no question of them continuing to hang out together. Something of that easy feeling came flowing right back. “Only if you tell me about yours.”

It was a later start to the day, given their breakfast had been really more of a lunch, not even a brunch. So it was past two by the time they headed out from the hotel. Easy walk to the beach, though, given it was only out the back door and down the set of stairs from the wooden boardwalk running behind the hotel.

Given she had to be hovering somewhere around the forty mark he’d passed a couple years back, she was one of those women who didn’t struggle to look half her age, and he was thankful for that. She wore a one piece unlike a lot of the women on the beach, yes, which didn’t signify to him–a woman could wear whatever the hell he wanted, in his opinion, skimpy or modest. But it was a cheerful yellow number with chocolate brown trim, showing off cute but strong freckled shoulders.

Miami had its rules, as Eliza had warned him, having lived down here for six years now herself. A weird expectation that you of course ought to wear a swimsuit because it was a beach town, but you couldn’t just wear a swimsuit because that somehow wasn’t fashionable enough. No shirt, no shoes meant no style…no shit.

Honestly, the whole thing left him with no fucking clue. He knew how to dress up, and he knew what he liked to wear on his own time, but this? He knew the desert all too well but not the beach, and were they going to swim or not? No clue. So he’d just thrown a short-sleeved tropical print button down shirt on with his swim trunks and hoped for the best. Apparently, to judge from the lack of looks they got, that passed muster. As did Sadie’s sarong knotted at her left hip.

Putting down towels, they ended up sitting there, and before long, they circled back to POISE, like they’d expected. It felt good, having someone to talk to about all that, without someone looking at him like some crackpot in a tinfoil hat.

It also felt good to talk about that rather than other things they had in common. They may have brushed up against it hard yesterday at the wedding and after, acknowledging their failed marriages and the loneliness of it, but while he might not have been a detective himself, he hadn’t survived all those years in the Middle East without some instincts and intuition. He knew there was a whole territory there neither of them wanted to touch. Her being an ex-cop, his being an ex-Marine, and what had gotten them there. The gritty details of exactly why they both were divorced. Whole stories of something haunted, he expected, that had absolutely nothing to do with a REM pod.

But it was a bright, sunny Sunday in south Florida and the water was a beautiful blue-green, and that meant it was hard to feel melancholy. Especially with her telling him about a poltergeist she’d run into, and there were grim stories in the paranormal business, but there were funny ones too.

“That was back when I just started. You know, back when you’re throwing down salt and sigils left and right, wearing like five pieces of silver, and jumping at every little noise. So the thing just yeets a book past my head. I look down and see it. ‘Infinite Jest’. Honestly, the thing was pissing me off with as much as it was throwing shit around but not engaging otherwise, and I had a contract to actually do the exorcism, you know? First time I’d taken one of those on rather than just identification and sending in someone with more experience. So I told it that its taste in literature sucked.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that. Even with as desperate as he’d been for reading overseas, he’d never been able to get into that one. Pretentious as hell. “And how’d it take that?”

“Manifested and screeched at me. Game on after that. Throwing things everywhere, and getting stronger by the moment from it. Got it done, but a lot sloppier than I am now. I actually lost money on that one with as much powdered silver as I wasted. Took my share of bruises and scrapes too from all the crap that poltergeist threw.”

“Better than Baby’s First Exorcism in my case. Took me two nights to even get the thing to do anything. I was at the point I was yelling at it to talk already or do anything, and cursing it as a useless fucking shade. Thought the person who’d sent me in there must have exaggerated the hell out of it. Then I look up and see that someone came out to play.”

She nodded sagely. “Fed off your frustration, mm?”

“Yeah. My mistake. Turned out it was a moroi.” Energy vampires, and one of his least favorite types. At least that one was the most wily one he’d run into, luring its prey in like that. He’d only strengthened it by his show of temper, enough to come after him and feed off his emotions before he shakily completed the ritual. “I ended up in bed half out of my mind for three days.” Never mind the things he’d dreamed, or hallucinated, during those three days. Things he didn’t really remember, and suspected he was thankful for that.

“Three days? Shit. You caught a powerful one. And your first exorcism?”

“The notes another POISE guy left made it sound like a shadow person. Should have been easy-peasy. Fooled us both, I guess.” Taught him to keep his cool. Why he’d lost it there, he didn’t quite know. It wasn’t like he’d learned at two different jobs to keep his admittedly fierce temper in check. Maybe it was the notion of failing that had done it, and people knowing he couldn’t even get rid of a garden variety shadow person, and at his fucking side job-slash-hobby besides.

“Guess we both learned to not provoke them too much.”

“Guess so.” Though after that miserably failed ambush masquerading as a parlay that left him bleeding out on the ground, and Lenny and others dead beside him…yeah. He’d told himself the only life he could get reckless with was his own. He’d learned a hard lesson with the moroi, but that didn’t mean sometimes he didn’t half-wish some entity would just hurry up and finish the job that some thugs had started.

You, he thought, are an absolute mess. Yeah, well, that was pretty fucking old news. A hot mess in a blazingly hot Florida summer.

Eliza loved it down here. He’d heard it when he talked to her on the phone. And yesterday? She was twenty-one years older than their own wedding day, but youth had nothing to do with it–she’d looked every bit as beautiful and radiant. Seeing her like that again made him happy for her, because he never could stop loving her, even if it wasn’t romantic any longer. But it twisted within his heart all the same, remembering he’d once been able to make her sparkle like that, and then he couldn’t. It only drove home his own broken solitude besides.

But as he’d told Sadie, he wasn’t looking for a hookup. He knew his own romantic stupidity when he was feeling soul-achingly lonely. Having Mary had been part of what got him through law school, because she had kept him going when sometimes he just wanted to quit. He’d always be thankful for that. They’d stayed polite if not intimate friends–at least he was good at keeping his exes as his friends–but when he could get past the longing that still cropped up inconveniently, he couldn’t believe they’d almost moved in together, that he’d been eyeing engagement rings. She’d thought he was a catch, a former Marine with fierce ambition putting himself through law school. She’d been disappointed as anything when he’d made it clear he wasn’t going to be a posh attorney raking in the cash as a pricey defense lawyer, or worse, a scum-sucking corporate shill. That had been the end of it. She’d been willing to put up with the cursing and the quasi-hick accent and the rest of it when she figured he was looking to polish himself up to a life of black tie and three hundred dollar a plate high society banquets. Nice woman, Mary Linton, but she’d never really touched the reality of him. Not the trashy Jerry Springer childhood, nor everything that followed in adulthood. He’d never let her know most of it. Probably in part because he’d known she wouldn’t be able to love the reality of him. Who could?

Though being honest, he’d projected on Mary just as much, feeling the depression after the divorce as he was, wanting to be anything but who he was. When he’d met Eliza, they’d found the common thread of being kids of high profile criminals trying to stay safely hidden and anonymous, but still bearing the scars. He had the infamous Lifetime movie–and at least one true crime book–plus his biological father’s shit besides. Eliza McCready, when he’d met her, legally went not by her father’s surname, not even her mother’s, but her maternal grandmother’s maiden name. Her mother’s way of protecting and distancing her daughter from the notoriety of a father whose years of killings didn’t quite have the infamy of a Bundy or Dahmer, but who certainly had at least several podcast episodes and probably a documentary by now. A name that would have followed Eliza the rest of her life, so her mother had legally changed it.

With Eliza, it felt so good to have someone who understood what it was like to bear that burden, especially at that age struggling so hard with fledgling adulthood. Even after the marriage failed, that deep empathy and support still remained. Part of why they hadn’t just drifted apart, he supposed, like many divorced couples without kids to raise, and instead they kept the strong threads of their friendship intact.

But with Mary, he’d run entirely the other way, to the point it felt like he’d almost been seeking someone with whom he had virtually nothing in common. Wanting that polish and poise, the silver spoon wife whose love would tell him he’d left both that ungodly childhood and the rough traumas of the Marines far behind. At the same time, not wanting her life, assuming he needed to rescue her from it, and all he had to do was show her that the low key life with a dog and kids and getting away from the urban rat race was the dream. Truth was she was a driven woman, Mary, and she liked her city life. He’d been lonely, and Mary had been lonely, and that was that.

And here he was with another lonely woman, and for fuck’s sake, he’d thrown the Lifetime movie right out there in a way he rarely did. Something about Sadie Adler, or more likely her identifying him immediately as Eliza’s ex, made him throw that out there. Citing a freak show childhood that he’d mostly dealt with before he went to Annapolis pushed people away. It got them to not look too closely at him in a way that the sadly all-too-common I was in the military overseas and got really messed up by the things I saw didn’t. Instead, she’d run with it rather than run from it.

All the same, he’d found there was far more to talk about with Sadie Adler in twenty-four hours than there had been in eight months of dating Mary Linton. Mutual childhoods in the Southwest, a comfortably familiar accent, and a love of Westerns from it–they spent a good hour arguing their top fives. The fascination of the paranormal, the X-Files, POISE, and various investigations. Talking about Philly and Baltimore, and swapping tips about restaurants and donut shops and everything. Then the things they didn’t talk about directly, but which stood there carefully understood all the same–the love and well-wishes they both still had for the two who’d just gotten married, and the abrupt end to careers that neither of them wanted to discuss.

He still didn’t even know what the hell she did now as a job, nor did she know that for him, but it didn’t seem to matter. Ex-Marine and former cop said enough already. Wasn’t that all just small talk anyway? He’d rather debate the merits of Philly cheesesteaks and Chicago Italian beef. Hear about her orange tabby, Bob, and tell her about his beloved mutt, Copper. Talk about IKEA furniture, or the Marvel cinematic universe, or anything else.

She asked if he wanted to go for a swim. He’d love to, in order to cool off, but that would mean taking that Hawaiian shirt off. Bad enough for the tan-fit-and-hairless-Hollywood-hot crowd to see and stare, but her? That would be even worse. He should have worn the damn rash guard rather than the shirt, but looked like he’d blown that call. So he demurred, making stupid excuses. She gave him a piercing look and said, “What, you never learn?”

Now that he couldn’t just let pass. “Naval Academy, sweetheart. They don’t even let you out of Plebe Summer without being able to swim, and the swim tests get harder each year you’re in. So no. And I swam just fine before that.” John never had learned, and would sulk in the shallow end, but he and Tilly had swum in plenty of cheap motel pools as they got dragged all over the country by dear Daddy Dutch. “Just ain’t feeling it at the moment, that’s all. I do like to swim, though. I scuba dive too.” Diving was calm yet methodical in a way he needed. Too bad he didn’t live down here with miles and miles of warm water shore. He’d probably dive every weekend, at peace under the water, rather than chasing ghosts.

She brightened at that. “I always wanted to learn, but no time for so many years, and I don't know, seemed like it could be such a…”

“You can say it,” he said dryly. “Sausage fest, with a side of competitive testosterone pissing?” She’d inevitably dealt with that as a cop. He didn’t mention another reason she probably had. Harder to get into diving consistently as a single person, in a sport that was all about having a buddy. Part of why he didn’t do it as much as he’d probably like. “It’s mostly not like that. Most divers are pretty cool.” But he ended up telling her about diving, and she ended up spinning her own tales of Brazilian jiujitsu, and thankfully the topic of a swim receded like the tide.

It was Sunday, so the crowds started to disperse as the afternoon wore on, and soon enough, they were some of the few left. Thinking of the rest of the evening, he said, “Dinner? More X-Files? You can tell me all the stuff they got wrong about aliens, Ms. Roswell. Maybe less Jim and Coke tonight, though.”

She laughed at that, which told him she’d accepted that particular offer. Though most of the lights had gone out near the stairs–either poorly maintained or busted by vandals. Even with the last of the sunlight, it was dark in the shadow of the boardwalk. Picking their way there, both of them stumbled over something, and he got one arm around her, caught himself with one hand against one of the solid wood pilings, and she’d grabbed onto his shirt for dear life besides. Strong grip. She was no delicate rose.

The feel of her there, warm and soft, and the fun he’d had with her since seeing her sitting at that table yesterday looking about as depressed as he felt, reminded him just how long it had been. How lonely it had been. He could bury himself in work or diving or ghost hunting or just binge watching whatever, but there were always days–and mostly nights–where he laid awake, acutely aware of what he’d lost.

He still had that impulsive daredevil streak, despite all the rigid discipline he’d learned to make work to his purpose. Maybe some of that desire he wryly described as his particular “Nine Inch Nails Phenomenon”. I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.

Or as his therapist liked to put it, his self-destructive personal tendency when he felt emotionally threatened by vulnerability to go full throttle into producing a situation that would provide a painful rejection just so he could prove to himself how messed up he truly was, and to push that person away besides before they got too close.

He liked his name for it better, really. Catchier. More succinct too.

So damn the torpedoes, he kissed her, there under the boardwalk. Knowing even as he did it that of course this wasn’t just flirting with disaster, it was damn well all the way to eloping with it. She’d almost inevitably tell him off for suddenly changing the game on her, he’d apologize, he’d just go back to his room and avoid her for the rest of his time here in Florida. And very, very carefully avoid her on the POISE Discord besides, now that he knew her username.

Neatly as he mentally drew that whole scenario out in an instant, she just as quickly kicked the shit out of it. He should have figured. She was as much of an adrenaline junkie as him, by the sound of it. And every bit as much as him needing to not think about too many things, and being sometimes reckless in how she went about it.

Like not just investigating ghosts and other entities, or communicating with harmless ones, but moving to the danger of banishment, the riskier the better. Like drinking far too much Jim Beam and Coke. Like eagerly making out with his ex-wife once removed the day after their exes got married, when he never did anything like this.

He was far, far from that young middie who’d fallen hard for a diner waitress. As spectacularly fucked up as his childhood was, it meant Eliza had been his first love. His everything.

This was nothing like that. No promises, no hopes, just…feeling something. But he definitely knew when things were shifting gears from making out, and with his hand on her shoulder, ready to slip one of her swimsuit straps down, this was headed there fast.

Lifting his head, he blurted, “I really did mean it about not doing wedding hookups…”

She went still as a lioness watching its prey, body suddenly tense under his hands. “Then you have,” she said, and he could sense the irritation under the icy precision of her words, “a hell of a lot of nerve starting something you don’t aim to finish.”

Well, he was every bit as much the sweet-talking charmer as he’d been at twenty-one. Clearly. Foot in his mouth so deep he must be gagging on it. Raking a hand through his hair, he tried to explain, feeling like a flustered fool. “No, it’s not that I don’t want this…want you. But I meant what I said. This isn’t something I do, not normally. Everyone I’ve ever been with, it was us in a relationship, OK? I didn’t say that yesterday just to get you here now.” He just didn’t want her to think he was a liar, or worse, a manipulative shit playing the sob story ex-husband card to prey upon women at the wedding.

Jesus Christ. She probably could tell from that awkward explanation alone that he was a man who, if he had any game at all, it wasn’t seduction, it was the likes of Skyrim.

He couldn’t really see her expression in the darkness, but her grip on his arm eased, and her body eased too. That clipped tone faded from her words. “It’s always been in a relationship with me too. Seems like I’m no good at them, though. So… I don’t know. Maybe just some uncomplicated fun’s what I need.”

He relaxed. Found his humor again, saying, “I guess it isn’t really a wedding hookup anyway when the wedding was yesterday. I’m pretty sure the rules on that involve eyefucking someone at the wedding and then actually fucking them a few hours later. Conversation? Hanging out? Apparently overrated.”

“Sounds about right. So, being as we seem to like each other’s company,” she patted his shoulder with her hand, then her fingers teasingly sliding along his jaw, “how about a nice little vacation fling?”

“Yeah, I think I could go for that.” Although as intriguing as a nice little vacation fling suddenly sounded, there were some practical considerations. “Uh. Being as I didn’t come here intending a wedding hookup or a nice little vacation fling, we’d better find a CVS or something before this goes any further. You may be on the pill or whatever, and sounds like neither of us gets around enough to worry about having caught something nasty. But…better safe than sorry?”

The last thing he needed right now was her getting pregnant. That would be probably the one thing he honestly couldn’t handle. Especially with Eliza telling him two weeks ago she was pregnant, and hearing her joy at it. She’d waited so long, after all. And waited for a man who wasn’t overseas all the time and who also wasn’t a total mess to have that child with her. He forced his mind out of that well-worn, dark rut, back to the here and now. He absolutely owed Sadie that.

“I’m not on anything. And,” she started laughing, because he could hear it, and feel the shake of her shoulders under his hands, “look, you’re in luck. I didn’t pack anything either, but my friend Abby threw some condoms in my luggage and a note telling me to have fun. I wanted to kill her when I found them, but looks like she was onto something.”

“Well, give her my thanks.”

“So,” her hand slid down his arm, taking his hand and tugging him out from the shadows towards the stairs, “want to take this up to my room?”

Yeah. Yeah, he actually really did, which surprised him. “Lead the way.”

She wasn’t sure how she found herself here, in a hotel room with a man she’d met yesterday, ready to have what they both agreed would be just a fling. But it didn’t feel wrong. Like she’d told him, she’d only ever done relationships. Maybe she needed to lower her sights a bit. It wasn’t like she’d picked out some stranger and taken him home with barely ten minutes of conversation and some dry humping on a dance floor. They’d talked plenty. She’d been enjoying his company out of bed, which would make it a hell of a lot easier to enjoy it in bed. But somehow the mutual agreement that this had an expiration date of their leaving Miami strangely released a lot of tension. She didn’t have to worry where this was going, what it all meant, and manage expectations.

The expectations were pretty damn clear on both sides. Uncomplicated fun. Not nearly so casually horny as a hookup, because there was definitely some good companionship going on here, but still…something that wouldn’t demand more from her than she had left to give. Something that wouldn’t show all her flaws and failures in unbearable high definition.

Though she quickly figured out why Arthur had been so squirrely about her suggesting a swim when he took his shirt off. He had a damn nice body, that much was clear. But she saw the massive swath of scar tissue at his left shoulder, and immediately understood.

She knew a healed gunshot wound when she saw one. Could be related to the Marines–it was in a place that she judged wouldn’t have been covered by military body armor, assuming he’d even worn it that day. Could also just be bad luck, a home robbery, a mugging, or any number of things. But it was a story that he obviously didn’t want to tell.

She caught the flicker of something almost defiant and mocking in those green eyes for a second, and the hard set of his jaw, practically daring Sadie to make something of it. To ask about it, to fuss over it, to focus on it. To disappoint him by reducing him to A Bad Thing That Happened.

She looked right back at him, staring him down with equal defiance. A one piece swimsuit didn’t exactly make for a seductive striptease, not that she was going for slow, teasingly sexy moves anyway. Briskly peeling it down her body, she kicked it off and stood there, and let him see exactly why she always wore a one piece.

It wasn’t about hitting forty, or modesty. It was mostly about how a bulletproof vest ended a bit above the waist so a person could still crouch and bend and move in it, and her bad luck in a bullet that had found that gap. About how she could be buck naked, and that was still the thing a would-be lover tended to zero in on.

He clearly knew an ugly gunshot scar as well as she did. Gave her a slight nod, acknowledging the conversation they’d just had without a word said, the recognition they both had. Got his thumbs under the waistband of his trunks and tugged them down, then came closer, tipping her chin up with his hand, kissing her again. Not too soft, not pitying, not a sweet little oh, baby, I’ll make it all better kiss.

Thank God.

Though she did learn throughout that night, and the days that followed, that he could be funny, fierce, rough, frustrating, teasing, passionate, generous. And, she had to admit, a man whose college education as a sailor had included various kinds of knots made for one very memorable afternoon. But he could be sweet and gentle too, finally showing that card as if he’d been hesitant to do so before, and she could rest easy that it wasn’t based in pity. He didn’t show tenderness out of fear of breaking her. It was just another part of him. A big part, apparently, and one he’d trusted her with, and it eased some of her own barriers, letting her respond in kind in a way she’d thought she needed to keep locked away.

She could tell herself it was just the clear end date that drove them like this. The clear end date, and the implied acceptance of mutual fucked-up lives with so many questions not asked. He could take her as she was, for the time being, and not demand more than that. Somehow that let her be far more generous and sincere in what she gave him than she had been in several sad, short-lived relationships after Jake. Nobody that came close enough to touch anything that truly mattered, if she were to be honest. For a nice little vacation fling, the lines almost immediately blurred, if not erased entirely, and she didn’t even care. So if she gratefully enjoyed the feeling of being held in his arms as she slept, the ease of watching TV snuggled up against him, and the comfort of sleepy mumbles with someone else there in the morning, she knew they both would take this time for what it was. A gift between them, not an emotional promissory note she could never pay up on. One he couldn’t pay up on either, she suspected. The candle burned all the more intensely for its brevity.

The sex was good, yes. Better than she’d ever thought she’d have again. But truthfully, they still spent most of their time with their clothes on, and enjoying that every bit as much. Talking, liking the company. He committed the sin of putting pineapple on pizza, but she let that pass with only a little shit given. He made teasingly snarky remarks about her lattes about how she probably ought to just get a milkshake rather than pretend she was drinking coffee, and she let that go. Finally getting around to talking about their jobs, though still in an offhand way. Nothing too close, nothing too painful in terms of reality that would intrude on this sunny little temporary bubble they’d built. She told him she worked in IT now, and he joked about her telling people to turn a computer off and on again. He told her he was a lawyer–not what she would have guessed, admittedly–and she teased him about fighting traffic tickets.

He made a rueful remark that from being a kid sent by a court to military school to eventually getting a law degree, it meant he was a case of “JD to JD”. Witty, but he said it with the offhand air of someone who’d made that joke enough times it had become armor. She didn’t probe further. Just let it go, accepting it, but noting it all the same.

He’d brought a short-sleeved rash guard to wear over his trunks, so they did go swimming. Spent their share of time on the beach, soaking in the sun. She bought them Miami Vices from a drinks stand, handing him one with the remark, “We’re on vacation. Needs some fruity tropical drinks.” Saw the quick momentary smile he gave her, a flash of gratitude, obviously remembering what he’d said about the last time he’d had something rum-based, and being able to help replace that memory with something happier.

Three days, and she felt better than she had in years. Felt grateful to him, this unexpected ex-husband once removed, for being here, and for making her feel all that again. Remember that she could have fun, enjoy all the little things, and bask in everything, from silliness to comfort to damn good sex to bad TV to the beauty of the sunrise, shared with someone else.

That last night, reality started to come back. She flew out in the morning. His flight was later in the afternoon. Sitting at Pearson’s over burgers again, she realized again why she didn’t do these things. Crashing back down from flying too close to the sun would hurt like hell. Not to mention it would be all fine and well to take up with some guy from California whom she’d never see again and dismiss him with casual well-wishes. But they lived not even two hours apart. They moved in the same paranormal community. She couldn’t quite rest easy on a passive yet decisive break like she could if he lived across the country from her.

He was the one who finally brought up the elephant in the room. “I know we agreed this was a vacation fling.”

“Yes.” God, was he going to turn things on her now? Want to actually give a go of it as a relationship? Her heart started pounding in her ears, her stomach feeling cold and sick. “We agreed on that, yeah. But let’s be real. It doesn’t give a good clean break easily, does it? We live in the same region and we’re in the same ghostbusting circles–”

He winced. “Seriously, do you have to call it ‘ghostbusting’?”

She sighed. “Instinct. It’s easier to joke about it that way to people. You get it.”

“Yeah, I get it. OK. Look, this has been…it’s been nice. I think we agree neither of us is looking for a relationship. But I think we make good friends, yeah?”

“Agreed. On both counts. So what are you proposing?”

“Let this go when we leave Miami, like we said. But I’d still like to…” He obviously searched for the right words. She couldn’t blame him. Hang out sounded too casual by this point. See you still felt loaded with romantic overtones. Do stuff together might be about the best she could come up with, but it sounded weak. “Be friends,” he said finally. “God knows I need ‘em.”

“Me too.” The tension eased at hearing he wasn’t trying to do an end run around the parameters they’d agreed upon. “Honestly, I’d rather not have to try to avoid you, especially around POISE. So I’m glad we’re not making this awkward.”

“I do have a contract I was thinking of taking. Guy insists it’s a two person job because he claims it’s haunted as hell. From reading the notes, he’s probably right that you don’t want to go in alone. Pissed off, active, noisy.”

“All the stuff to make it fun, in other words.” She saw right where he was going with this.

“You want in?”

“Why not?” It wasn’t like she had anything better to do with her Friday nights, so to speak.

“Thanks. You’re saving me from having to let this one guy in on it. If I can bring someone else in who’s already my partner, that’ll shut him up, because he’s been all over my ass since he knew I got this one.”

“Do I know him?”

“Hope not. Micah Bell. Pain in the ass, big talker. He’s from Ohio.”

“I’m suspicious of anything and anyone from Ohio.” Though she’d heard of him, all right, and very little of it was positive.

That earned her a hearty laugh. “Me too. But he’s trying hard to make a big name for himself, or whatever, so he’ll hurry to try to grab any contract he can for the publicity. Been in newspapers, on local news, has an official website and everything. Don’t know if he’s made it to Philly.”

“Oh, he has. Unfortunately. I’m familiar with him.”

“I think he’s honestly expecting to become a Discovery Channel star or something. I did a contract or two with him already when I didn’t have any other choice available and he pushed his way in. If I’m stuck with him again, I might commit murder.”

“Arthur, do you really want to say that to a former cop?” But she winked as she said it, letting him know she wasn’t serious.

As they so often had these past few days, he deftly turned it right back on her. “Well, I’d say we could probably have a lot of fun with letting you frisk me and then pulling out some handcuffs, but alas, those days are behind us as of tomorrow.”

Goddammit. She could just imagine it too. Something in her budged a bit. It didn’t have to be so black and white as that, did it? She didn’t have to experience that sickening plummet by cutting everything off with such immediacy. They were grown adults, they could keep some rules and boundaries. “I mean, we could be friends with occasional benefits, you know. Like you said, we don’t do hookups, and we’re not looking for a relationship, so that really does leave not much in the way of options when you’re feeling lonely. And I’ve already slept with you so it’s not going to make the friendship weird to take it there.”

He lifted his beer in salute. “Very sensible.”

She sat back, giving him a smile in return. “So tell me about this job, huh?”

The pressure came off from that. Tonight didn’t have to be eking out the last hours together, the final goodbye. They’d see each other again, and they could be smart and sensible about it. So there was no desperation or sorrow to it, especially once they were back in his room, just the sense of things put on a natural pause, to be taken up again later.

She left for the airport watching him raise his hand in farewell as the airport shuttle headed out. She had Arthur’s number in her cell phone, and the information about the job scribbled in her little notebook. Cop habits stuck, I see, he’d said laughingly, seeing she carried one in her purse even now.

Flying north to Philly, she felt better than she had for a good while. She’d thrown back two cocktails on the way down to Miami, a mess of confused feelings, and on this flight, she just went for a Coke. Things hadn’t shifted in some colossal way, but the comfort of feeling like something in her life had gotten more interesting meant a lot.

The week passed, the two of them texting some. Nothing too dramatic. Memes, jokes, continuations of conversations they’d started down in Florida. But she found herself smiling at them all the same.

She drove down into Maryland with the setting sun on a Wednesday, heading for an old place a bit north of Baltimore called Shady Belle Farm. Found Arthur there already, with an old silver Mustang, in front of a decrepit old farmhouse. “And here I half expected a big ol' pickup truck.”

He gave a magnificently derisive snort. “That kind of gas mileage, in this economy?” He patted the car’s hood. “Boadicea does just fine by me, thanks.”

She couldn’t even give him crap for naming his car, given she was driving the burgundy Bronco she’d dubbed Hera. Shaking her head, she pulled her equipment out from the backseat. Running the checklist, she wasn’t surprised to see he had a solid kit with good quality stuff, and that it was well-maintained and neat as a pin besides. No dabbler. She was equally aware of him checking her kit out and probably coming to the same conclusion. “Got the house keys?” she called.

He tossed them to her, and she caught them with a neat flick of the wrist. “Softball?”

“All through high school.” She nodded towards the farmhouse. “Looks like it’s been empty a good while.” The boards of the house and barn, faded to a tired grey by weather and sun, looked solid enough, but she wasn’t entirely going to trust her footing in there.

“Yeah, seems like nobody’s stayed long for quite a while. A couple years, all the way down to just a couple months. Been totally empty for years now. Place keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Some of that’s maybe the ghostie guests, but the cost of trying to turn this place around probably doesn’t help. It’s cheap to buy, yeah, but especially with what good farm acreage adds to the price and the tax bill, it’s too steep to just fix up the house to live there. The current owner wants to turn the rest of the plot into some family farmer’s market kind of thing. You know the type. Apple picking and hayrides in the fall.” He said it without derision.

She knew the kind of place. The sort she’d once imagined taking a kid of their own with Jake. “Loud obnoxious ghost does put a cramp in that plan.”

He’d given her the backstory, at least as much as the client’s knowledge and mostly his own research could tell him. She’d looked into it as well with the few days she’d had. There was a reason the place was haunted as hell. It had been the site of a shootout–a massacre, really–of the O’Malley Gang. Either a post-Civil War criminal gang or a bunch of anti-capitalist agitators inspired by the Molly Maguires, depending whose interpretation you trusted. Probably some of both, to judge. It seemed like ever since then people bought the place with ambitions, did enough work to keep the old girl chugging along–barely–and then ended up giving up.

At least this one had been smart and called in an investigation and exorcism team before he started hanging curtains and picking paint colors.

Stepping inside, she smelled mildew and that something had died in there, the odor of rot faded to the musty smell of decay long since completed. But it was far too recent to have been any of that gang. Probably an animal. Dust carpeted most everything, cobwebs hanging like delicate lace. She’d guess it had been ten years or possibly more since anyone had set foot in this place.

She could also feel the sheer weight of something there, a spiritual pressure. Those who tended towards the paranormal usually had that kind of sensitivity, she found. And this felt disquieting. Like peering into the dark and seeing the reflection of a wolf’s eyes in the blackness, waiting for the pounce and the snap of teeth, the instinctive urge to run shivering up and down her spine. “You feel it?” It felt almost oppressive, nauseating and choking. Something horrible had happened here, the stain of it persisting undaunted.

“Yeah. No need to go any deeper into the house. Be on your guard.” She found herself fiddling with the silver bracelet around her wrist for a moment as she unpacked the hefty box of salt. Morton’s, nothing fancy needed, but it did the job. Between the two of them, they managed the protective circle of sigils fairly quickly, making most of the front foyer into a safe haven.

Good thing too, because she started to catch the signs of something responding to the fools who’d crossed into its lair. The sudden chill, a noise here and there, a flicker of shadow past the edge of the lights. Bogeymen and terrors of the tales passed down across a thousand generations, people recognizing the reality of fearful things that lurked in the dark.

She was so used to people exaggerating their problems with spirits, because they sounded cooler that way. This one? If anything, the guy who’d called Arthur in had no idea how bad this was. One of the worst she’d felt. Every instinct in her protested, recognizing something out there, a predator awake and hoping to feed. There had been no need to hunt this ghost down, no slow game of finding it and its preferred spots. All the equipment they’d brought wouldn’t be needed for that. Because it had eagerly found them.

Salt and silver and sigils might keep them physically safe, so long as they stayed within the boundaries. But there was nothing to keep it from trying to feed all the same. Even dangerous and violent spirits mostly didn’t attack to feed on flesh. Spirits were the remnants of memories and emotions, after all. So they fed on spiritual energy, particularly strong emotions, which meant in the case of something dark and dangerous it was best to stay as calm and collected as possible.

Trying to collect evidence helped. They might not need to locate it, but they needed to identify it, and that meant testing its response to various things. It blew out candles with a gust of cold wind, seeking the power of the dark, and she could practically sense its frustration at the flashlights it couldn’t budge. It set the EMF meter screaming like a fire engine. It triggered the triangle of REM pods one by one with a speed that told her there was no outrunning this one. The evidence collected, and the more it came in, the more that submerged sense of dread grew.

By the time Arthur turned on the spirit box and asked it if it had anything to say, she could tell he knew as well. The low scratchy distorted male voice that answered only cemented it, bits of phrases that faded in and out as it prowled around, ranting to itself in an angry litany that it had probably been reciting nonstop for the past hundred years and more. “....losing your faith…doubters, all doubters…you belong to me...need a better plan…stay strong, stay with me…leave when I say we…if we die, we die free…after everything I’ve done…ingrates, selfish children…should have known you’d betray…Goddamn you…holding out on…”

Most of the O’Malley gang had died that day, including two women. But she suspected she knew who they’d found–Aiden O’Malley himself. A charismatic, driven, cunning, and apparently somewhat self-centered man in life. A jealous, furious, possessive, and vengeful spirit in death. No fancy name for this particular type of entity, aside from maybe “oh fuck”, because most people very sensibly ran the hell away rather than stick around to further describe it.

The thing about that kind of spirit, though, was that it was self-aware enough to not just repeat its loop of movements and sounds. A malevolent intelligence, and suddenly the sounds weren’t just in the spirit box, they were all around, a hissing, seething chant that wove in dozens of voices. Voices of friends she’d pushed away, voices of people she’d failed on the job, Jake at his most impatient and dismissive. The voices of children she’d only seen in her dreams, but angry and accusing her of never letting them exist. Sean. Over and over again, Sean. But words her genial Irish-born partner had never actually said, but she’d heard them in her mind all the same. Words about how she’d fucked up, how she’d led them into a bad raid off bad intel, how he’d had a girlfriend and a baby he’d never met because of it, and why had he died when she was the one who didn’t give a shit about living? She ought to just stick her pistol in her mouth and do the world a favor.

Rationally, she knew it was O’Malley’s spirit feeding off the darkness inside of her, the guilt and depression and anger and fear that she’d worn like a burial shroud for all these years. Given the words it had said on the spirit box sounded like it was probably a narcissistic manipulative fuck in life, of course it would try to manipulate even after death.

Words too that she didn’t recognize as her own haunted memories, that must have been his nightmares, more accusations about unjust deaths that practically echoed Sean, Eliza’s warm low voice turned into an angry shout, a man twisting things talking about how if Arthur loved him he’d do this and how he depended on him. Other voices, all of their words harsh, maybe ghosts that were neither his or hers, but some other poor bastard who’d run across this spirit.

Then she looked up and saw the figure standing there halfway up the stairs, a tall man with a dark mustache, dressed in Victorian fashion–a dapper vest, crisp white shirt, and dark pants–regarding the two of them with a slow smile and a shark’s soulless black eyes. Even from a distance of a century or more, his spirit without masks or lies told the tale. Death had carved away everything but the core essence. In life, some people must have met an ostensibly deeply charming Aiden O’Malley and yet felt a shiver run down their spine in a way they couldn’t explain.

She found she’d reached down and was clutching Arthur Morgan’s hand for dear life, and he was holding on to her every bit as hard. A momentary rough choked sound came from him at the voice of a child saying it all happened because Daddy wasn’t there, but she felt the moment they stopped being driven before the force of it like sheep, where it clicked into a place of resolve instead, where anger at having so much pain pulled out and examined and mockingly used as a weapon like it was some kind of delightful toy turned into a steely determination.

Good thing too, because the more powerful an entity was and the more firmly it got rooted in a place, the longer and more intricate and precise the exorcism ritual. O’Malley's ghost had dug in deep, and fed well enough on anguish and fear that even meals years or even decades apart only strengthened it. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She and Arthur had offered him a damn seven course dinner, hadn’t they? The smirk of O’Malley’s said everything.

She let go of his hand, or he let go of hers, in order to have both hands free for the work ahead. Pushing along step by step, checking and double checking with each other on every bit as they’d only get one shot at this, they worked well in tandem. That wasn’t a given. There was no one-size-fits-all handbook for this. Each hunter had to discover what felt right and resonated with them, and thus while the basic ideas and rituals were the same, they all developed their own particular ways, their own quirks and words and tools, of performing the white magics of banishment and protection. Sometimes the pain in the ass of working with someone else came when their ways didn’t mesh well. But she and Arthur managed, melding things with only a few temporary hitches. That smooth precision she’d had a few times in her life–with Sean at work, with Jake for the good years. She was glad for the focus of the fine details, the need for absolute attention on pronouncing the ritual words, forming the crisp and exacting lines of the binding and banishment sigils, arranging the candles and sticks of incense just so, and all the rest. It gave her something to center herself, to shut out the howling storm of voices.

Over and over, the steps repeated to weaken O’Malley’s spirit, to uproot it, each iteration meaning the voices grew fewer, grew quieter, until what had been a dull roar was barely a whisper. At that point, all that remained was to complete the business by making the house no home for it to return to in the future. Telling it that it would do no more harm here.

That meant opening all the doors and windows, putting lines of mixed salt and silver and charcoal by each as well, burning incense, reciting the words firmly and decisively that revoked any kind of resident right it had tried to claim. Room by room, they methodically worked their way through the house. Not splitting up, as she might have done on other jobs, but sticking close together. It made it take longer, but admittedly, she didn’t want to be alone in this house right now.

Along the way, numerous other spirits in the house left too. She felt them. Less angry, less malevolent, mostly confused or sad or frightened. People who’d been in that gang, perhaps? Or others, before or since. She didn’t know, but they’d been trapped here, stuck with the asshole who clearly had proclaimed himself in charge. They left, sometimes with a whispered word or two, sometimes with the light rattling of an object, sometimes with a passing caress like a hand on the shoulder but was a breeze that shouldn’t be possible indoors, and sometimes with nothing more than the sense of something having left, of a load lightened. They went gently, gratefully, easily. Less rooted here than chained, now they were free.

They finished right around dawn. Said nothing to each other as they packed their things and trudged out the front door, locking up again. Ready to turn this newly cleansed place over to the guy with his plans of happy weekends for families, apple picking and hayrides and laughter and sunshine, knowing that might actually be possible now.

Even an ordinary banishment of a chained ghost eager to go, or a minor nuisance, tended to be a drain. After dealing with Boss Asshole and then nearly a dozen more spirits besides, the thought of the hour and a half drive back to her townhouse felt as impossible as running a marathon right now.

Arthur looked at her, and finally spoke. She could see the weary droop to his shoulders, the heaviness in his eyelids that told her he was every bit as exhausted. “My place is about twenty minutes. We can get some rest. You able to manage that? If not, I’ll drive.”

“No, I can make it.” She’d rather have her own car right there. No shade against him, but just the matter of fact policy that she didn’t much like being dependent on anyone else to leave someone’s place, no matter why she was there. Too many years working too many crimes.

Though some part of her wanted nothing more than to be alone right now after how raw her soul had been scoured there, and some part of her wanted nothing more than to have him right there and hope that he could make her forget this too. She suspected he felt the same conflicting, confusing emotions.

Instinctively, he would have as soon sent her on her way, rattled as he was, but there was no way he could do that. He knew what a night of intense paranormal workings took out of a person, and they’d done some incredibly heavy lifting with kicking out the last remnants of Aiden O’Malley, to say nothing of freeing all those others. Much as there was that impulse to go hide like an animal in its den, he couldn’t send her on her way with a decent drive back home to Philadelphia. If she got into a crash because of her fatigue, he’d never forgive himself. God knew his list of reasons for probable damnation was already a pretty long one.

Of course it was only his concern for her safety. Of course. The equally deep urge to keep her near that warred with his need to be alone had absolutely nothing to do with anything, did it?

They got back to his house, an old stone mill that he’d spent the last six years fixing up, and he tiredly fended off Copper’s determined efforts to shower him with love. He didn’t have a spare bedroom just now–nobody came to visit, he always went to them. Which really said everything about everything he’d just passively given up on, didn’t it? But he got her set up on the couch with a pillow and blanket, wanting to be a gentleman and expecting she might want her own space, and what had happened in Miami didn’t mean he could assume anything here anyway about willingness to share a bed.

She sagged down onto the couch like a half-empty sack of flour, and as much as he’d told himself he would head to his own bedroom and collapse there, he found himself hesitant to leave. Even though that vicious bastard of a ghost had flayed open far more than he’d wanted her, or anyone, to ever see. But still. He’d slept off his share of jobs, determinedly alone, even if he’d had a partner for it telling them of course he’d be fine. His burdens were his own to bear. He’d made that decision long ago. He wouldn’t make them anyone else’s problem.

And yet. She was here, and he couldn’t quite leave. Paralyzing anxiety or something else, he didn’t quite know, but he sensed that neither of them could quite walk away from last night pretending nothing had happened. He’d shed his clothes multiple times with her, but only now did he really feel naked, exposed, defenseless. This time he hadn’t been able to choose his own battlefield and boundaries, give her only so much of the ugly truth as he felt necessary, and hide the rest behind either a comfortable mutually accepted silence or else defensively glib quips. That decision got ripped out of his hands by a malicious gang boss who’d died over a century ago, and it left him reeling. He wanted to explain himself, rather than have her think the worst. He wanted to hold on to her for dear life. He wanted to give her whatever reassurance he could, because he hadn’t been alone in getting the shit kicked out of him, and oh God, he’d gotten so used to licking his wounds by himself so they wouldn’t affect anyone else. But she had her own share of them, so…he shouldn’t leave, right?

She must have seen him standing there like an indecisive idiot, because she tiredly waved a hand towards the couch and said, “Just come here already before you topple over. I don’t have the energy to haul you up off the floor.” Looking at him with too many of her own scars and raw wounds now showing in her amber eyes.

He nodded, sat down beside her. Wondered how the hell this whole conversation ought to go. But the fatigue tugged at him, harder and harder, and he found himself drifting off. Woke with a tongue dry as a cotton ball, and the bright afternoon sun shining through the windows that faced towards the creek. Lying down on the couch, Sadie’s hair tickling his cheek, her hand resting on his shoulder as she lay there half on top of him, his arm around her. For a moment, memories of Eliza when things had been good rose up, how perfect and comfortable it had felt having her in his arms while they slept. He felt the weight of grief all over again, reminded of a whole world he’d lost.

She stirred, and pushed up enough to look at him, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Something soft and sad there too, and he had to think she’d been just the same in remembering Jake and sweet lost dreams. “I’ll order some pizza,” he said finally. “We need to eat.” That was only the truth, and he didn’t feel like being out in public just now at a restaurant. He wasn’t fit to be around other people. Whether he was fit to be around Sadie Adler, he’d let her judge. But he realized, with a sense of calm resignation, that there was no going back. He’d let her in, closer and closer, trying to tell himself all the while that it was fine and she wouldn’t come close enough to be threatened by the reality of him. But she’d gotten close enough to fully see the mess, and he couldn’t pretend that away. She knew as well as he did that malicious spirits tended to attach to strong emotions, so she would know exactly what had happened in that farmhouse with O’Malley’s ghost, and why. The fact she’d left herself every bit as exposed, though–was she automatically going to be overwhelmed by him?

Maybe, he thought, maybe she can…you don’t hit it off with someone that much just by bonding over your divorces. That would have been a rueful commiseration drink that first night, and probably goodbye after that. Even their insistence on it just being a fling–he admittedly didn’t have experience to draw upon, but flings were still supposed to be casual fun, weren’t they? They were supposed to be pure sexual combustion and gleeful abandon gratefully experienced but easily put away, not comfortable companionship in a way that felt like for a few days the holes in his soul had been filled.

It was faster than he’d ever felt something for someone, that was true. That perhaps had been part of what made him dismiss it. But he’d been so good at seeing what he wanted to see, gone desperate with longing to believe. He’d proved that with Mary. He firmly yanked the leash and told his heart and his hopes to settle down, and worry instead about the grim business of honesty looming right in front of them.

While waiting on the pizza, they showered and cleaned up. He wasn’t planning to go anywhere today, so he stuck to a t-shirt and some sleep pants. She borrowed a t-shirt and gym shorts from him for the time being. Once the food arrived, they ravenously dug in, and the silence was a little too much, so he turned on the TV for some noise. Seeing it was Law and Order, he hastily changed over to Food Network and Chopped.

Watching to the end of the episode, both of them ending up debating the merits of trying to make dessert with grappa, Creole cream cheese, Takis, and serviceberries, and finishing off the last of the pizza, he knew there was no more stringing this out. Grabbing the remote, he turned the TV off again. Looked at her, in his too-large shirt with her hair in a braid over her shoulder and her feet tucked up under her on the couch, he could imagine how she’d looked long ago when she was young, a college kid with probably all the optimism in the world. In love with Jake, as the man had told Arthur he and Sadie got married every bit as young as him and Eliza. Giving her whole self in love in only the way those whose hearts hadn’t been disillusioned and battered yet could manage, before it required deliberate courage to risk it again. We never imagined it’d be like this then, did we? None of us.

“I’m sorry. I should have warned you. When it’s something that dark and powerful, my whole mess can be…a liability, drag someone else into danger by it.” It was one thing to risk his own neck. Putting someone else on the line by it was unacceptable.

She made a dismissive gesture. “You didn’t know we were walking into that. And it’s not like my whole mess didn’t throw as much gas on the fire.” She looked up, her gaze meeting his, and both of them went quiet again. Not knowing where to begin, he suspected.

He told himself if for no other reason, she had to know so she could take it into account for any future jobs they might ever do together. That somehow made it easier to grasp. He was telling her for her own good, giving necessary information for her safety, rather than just spilling his guts for her perusal and judgment, trying to explain the utter disaster area that was his personal existence. “I wasn’t kidding about the Lifetime movie.”

“I didn’t think you were.” He also suspected she hadn’t hurried to watch it. That made him think better of her.

“But…I got over it. Thought I had, anyway. It felt like I got straightened out, got a good family, and had a fresh start. Got accepted to Annapolis, got married to Eliza the week after graduation. We were young, yeah, but it felt right. It was right, you know? She was in school at UM College Park, and working as a waitress. I graduated, she stayed there to do her senior year, and I went down to Quantico for training. Saw each other on weekends and what evenings I had, so it wasn’t bad.”

She nodded, trading him something in kind, and that was a relief. He wouldn’t have to give her the whole thing at once and at length. “Jake and I grew up together. Damn near inseparable. People joked about us being boyfriend and girlfriend from the time we were in elementary school, and it felt easy as breathing. We were always sweet on each other. We started dating in high school. Longest two years of my life waiting to graduate and go to Colorado State for college, so I could be with him again rather than just for holidays and over the summer. We got married after my freshman year, moved into this cheap off-campus apartment–beige carpet, 70’s harvest gold appliances, and everything. Roaches sometimes. We didn’t care. It was ours. He graduated and went to work in a restaurant, and I kept at the classes.”

“We didn’t expect it, but she got pregnant late that summer.” Probably one of those weekend leaves up at her small apartment, the ones they’d made love half the night, giddy and excited and so overjoyed to be together even for about thirty-six hours that him going back to Quantico and her going back to classes exhausted didn’t matter. She’d been on the pill, true, but they were young and apparently fertile as hell and nothing was foolproof. “Knew it was gonna be tough, with me signed up for months and months of Marine training between the Basic Officer Course and then Speciality and her finishing up school, and shit, we didn’t even know where we’d land once I got an assignment, so it was hard for her to look for jobs even before a baby entered the picture. But we didn’t care. We were in it together all the way, so it just felt like this big adventure. Talked about names. Isaac for a boy, Sarah for a girl.”

“We talked too. William–Billy–for a boy. Hannah for a girl. There were a couple times I wondered, but the test always came back negative. Sounds like it was like with you two. We were at the point where if it happened by accident, we’d be happy and figure it out, but we agreed we wouldn’t actively try just yet. He had the hours at the restaurant, then I had the police academy, and we were young. We’d have time when things settled down more.”

They didn’t say anything directly about each others’ words–unburdenings, whatever they were–only acknowledging them with an answering one of their own, keeping the flow going until the next good pause came to hand it back over again. It felt like to stop and talk about any of it would bring the whole thing to a crashing halt. “Then 9/11 happened a few months after I graduated. You get into the military knowing it’s no walk in the park. But the bottom dropped out from under all of us suddenly. I think my year got it the worst. The ones before us got their feet under them before things went to shit. The ones after us at least had time and knew what they were walking into. But things shifted on us in the middle, and we went from expecting stuff like peacekeeping aid to actively being at war, and knowing once we got out of training, we were almost definitely going right to Afghanistan. Bad enough. But then Eliza lost the baby. She wasn’t quite three months in. Hadn’t told our families yet. We were planning to do that on her birthday in a couple of weeks.” By the time he’d gotten leave to go and made it to the hospital, it was long since all over. “Happens a lot in the first trimester, so they told me.” He’d heard far more about miscarriage statistics than he’d ever wanted, and it was little reassurance. “Losing a baby so early, before anyone else knew…felt almost like it wasn’t something we could tell people, like it wasn’t real. Not like losing one at six months, or losing them after they’re born. But Eliza made them find out, and they let her know it was a boy. So he was real, he was Isaac, and we lost him.” Twenty years later, it hurt. Hurt even more to keep thinking and wondering and cutting himself with the conviction that somehow, if he’d been there, Isaac would have been fine, and Eliza wouldn’t have carried the pain of it for the next dozen years. That voice he’d heard last night bitterly said just that about Arthur’s priorities, in that little boy’s voice he’d never heard but dreamed more than once saying happy, loving things in a way that left him waking up hurting and empty. Last night that voice left him not aching with loss, but feeling cut to pieces.

She stayed silent, continuing giving him the floor as it were, recognizing he hadn’t stopped, only gathering his strength up again. So he went on, moving forward towards what felt like a reasonable pause. “So we picked up the pieces as best as we could, I went to Afghanistan, she graduated and got a job teaching, and we told ourselves we’d try again later. But the war just kept going, and it went to Iraq besides, and the deployments got longer and the times between them shorter.” It felt increasingly like his life back in America was a dream, a temporary interlude. “I was an intelligence officer besides. They recommended it for me during BOC, and I’d learned how to read people and situations for scams when I was a kid, so it felt like it balanced things to use that for something good. They always needed intel officers, and that puts you in even riskier situations. I knew at best she’d be raising a kid mostly by herself. At worst…I saw kids left behind by parents who got killed. I didn’t want to promise anything I couldn’t keep, not to Eliza or to a kid. So we just kept putting it off. And I kept getting sent back. And I saw more and more shit, so I kept finding more and more reasons to keep putting it off and telling her it wasn’t the right time."

Now she picked up her part again. “We stayed busy. Jake put in his time at various places and then he started a food truck, and then a little restaurant, barely room for a dozen people in there. I made detective, then sergeant. We hit thirty. And he started talking more about kids. I just…I’d waited for years, when we agreed we weren’t in a good place for it. Watching him work eighty hour weeks on the grind so his career could take off, and accepting that we had to worry about that first. And now it was my career really taking off. I got the undercover unit, which was demanding as hell, and I needed to be the one putting in the hours to hopefully make lieutenant, and he kept reminding me we didn’t have forever. He wasn’t wrong, I know it gets harder to conceive the older you get. But it felt like he got what he needed for years with me being patient and supportive and putting up with the demands of his job, and when I needed that from him, he wasn’t with me, he was bringing up our tick-tock-biological-clock. And I saw way too much. Things I didn’t want to ever bring home to him, let alone to a child. Not everything I told him about not being ready from just the hours I was putting in was always true. Or at least not the whole truth. Or even most of it.”

God, he understood that all too well. “I got sent on a parlay in Afghanistan with some of the local tribal leaders, trying to see what they needed from us, and of course to get a feel for things. I spoke pretty good Arabic and some Farsi and Dari by then, after all those years. Turned out it was actually a set-up by an insurgent group. The rest of the team got killed. Including a nineteen-year-old kid from Alabama. Lenny. Lenny Summers. He was…you could call him my protege, if you had to call it anything. But he was really a little brother, though.” Brilliant kid, brave as hell. Arthur had been encouraging him to go to OCS, seeing the potential in him, all cut short in an instant. “They knew I was in charge so they shot me in the shoulder and captured me alive. Probably for use as a bargaining chip. I woke up that night in their camp, and managed to escape. Guess they figured I was injured enough they didn’t even tie me too tightly. I got lucky. I found an Army patrol before the rebels found me again.”

“My partner, Sean MacGuire, and I had gotten inside this motorcycle club. We were close. The brother I never had, really. We’d dug into it and found all sorts of nasty shit. Both manufacturing and running drugs, guns, trafficking women–girls sometimes–rumors about murder for hire and bodies left way out in the mountains that I didn’t doubt were likely to be true. Some likely ties to running weapons and explosives to far right groups besides. They were about to clear their base out so we had to push up the raid by a couple of weeks, and make up a lot of it on the fly. It was this place in the middle of nowhere at the top of a fucking mountain, no less. Went south in a big hurry. Sean got killed. I got shot and captured, it ended up in a hostage situation, but they got taken down. The Feds took over the case, the ambulance got me to the hospital fast enough that I didn’t bleed out. My intestines were a mess, though. Took a long time to heal. I still can’t stand soup and pudding and applesauce too often.”

That explained the wicked scar on her stomach well enough, yes. Low, below where a bulletproof vest would have offered protection. Explained a hell of a lot else besides. “Not much to say after that. I got a medical discharge given the shoulder would take a long time to fully rehab. Came home. Eliza and I tried. Didn’t fix it.”

“Same for Jake and me. They pretty much forced me to retire because I was spinning out. Eventually I freaked out and ended up leaving him a note and flying to Maine, because it was about as far as I could go and still be in the US. I’m not proud of that. I came back after a couple of days. I needed some breathing room to think. To just not be there with all that pressure to figure it out, and the guilt. So after I got home, I told him I thought it was better that we get a divorce. That I just stop…not being the woman he needed.”

He could hardly judge. “I spent a lot of days alone. Going to parks for some peace and quiet, and walks to build my strength back up. But mostly just so I didn’t have to be there. See how I just…couldn’t be there for her. I wrote her a letter and didn’t come back until after dinner because I figured she’d have a couple hours to turn the idea over. And I wouldn’t have to see the look on her face.” Somehow he wasn’t surprised that both of them had been the ones to initiate the end of their marriages, to let people go whom they couldn’t make happy anymore. Eliza would have been hesitant to cut the line. To her, it would have felt like kicking Arthur when he was already down. He had the feeling Jake Adler was the same way, even from just a little conversation with the good-natured chef. “It seemed the kindest thing I could do for her was let her go. Stop letting all my shit hurt her. She’s a good woman. She deserved a hell of a lot more than I could give her by that point.”

Somewhere along the way this had flipped on him. It moved from very practically warning Sadie about his problems for her own good on any future paranormal jobs to just confiding in her, and he knew it. But he couldn’t seem to stop. Couldn’t want to stop. Some of it was that need in him to keep going, to find the line that was too much and which would safely push her back. But he’d already laid so much out that pushing her back wouldn’t make him safe again anyway, and he had the half-fearful, half-hopeful feeling that line might not exist for her. And being able to just talk about it–the times he’d talked about it before, one of two things happened. With a therapist, and a few people, they started looking at him with a calm, analytical gaze, trying to figure out how best to fix him. Or else they just looked at him with concern, or pity, or confusion, and he felt the distance between them as real as anything, knowing they were on the other side of that gulf and there was no bridge. He was either a problem to solve or a calamity to avoid, and that became the entirety of him in their eyes. With Sadie, somehow he felt like he was a person. You see me. And you’re not running.

“Quarantine.”

“What?”

“I don’t mean COVID. I mean…all the bad stuff. We both quarantined it away, right? So it wouldn’t infect other people, especially Jake and Eliza. But it just got to be locking more and more away. Because especially by the end, there wasn’t really anything left in us that it didn’t touch.”

That was about as good a summation as he could imagine. “Just about. I spent a little while drinking too much and feeling too sorry for myself.” Hosea and Bessie had worried, and he still felt guilty about that. “Figured I might as well try to do some good where I could. So I went to law school.”

“What exactly is it you do? I know I joked about writing wills or something like that, but…” But now she wanted to know, and some part of him actually wanted her to know.

“Child advocate attorney.” Looking out for kids as best he could, whether it was divorces, juvenile crimes, abuse cases, or anything else. Remembering how lost he’d felt when it was him, all those years ago. How much he’d wanted and needed someone to stand for him, fight for some hopeful future, rather than just writing him off as unsalvageable collateral damage.

He’d finally landed in a great home with Hosea and Bessie, even if he’d been a defiant little shit towards them, screwed everything up three weeks in, and ended up arrested and sent to military school. But they’d been there for him, drove two hours every weekend to visit after the first month when they were finally allowed. That told him they were serious. They’d told him that they’d be waiting to bring him home every weekend too if he graduated to the regular student program for spring semester rather than staying a resident student with the other juvenile delinquents. He’d worked his ass off for the next few months to keep his grades up and his demerits down, because they’d offered him hope and a home, and that was everything. He’d stayed in a military school after that year, thriving on the structure and the challenge, but it had been a prestigious one close to home, not the court-ordered one. But that had been pure luck. It could have been yet another shitty foster home that took him in rather than the Matthewses.

She nodded, as if somehow she wasn’t surprised. “You’d know better than most what those kids need, I expect.”

“You?” She’d mentioned something about being in IT, but he really didn’t think she ran a help desk telling people how to boot up Windows.

“Private investigator. I do mostly online stuff, though.” He sensed that wasn’t the entire story, and that she’d be bored as hell chasing down fraudulent charges or whatever. She hesitated. “Mostly I work on helping hunt down traffickers, especially when it’s kids and immigrant women. It’s not something I can talk about a lot. Most people don’t really want to hear about that over drinks and appetizers, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” He wasn’t surprised by that at all either. Like he’d told her in Miami, he suspected the vow to protect and serve hadn’t ended when she’d handed in her badge. She’d found something to do to help, though he also expected much like him, there was an edge of self-justification to her new profession alongside resolve and passion. He’d told himself that he was clearly a damaged fuck-up as a person and as a husband, but at least professionally he could go do something useful and help other people rather than feel sorry for himself. “And ghosts? Well, that made sense too, really. Especially once I got to exorcisms. Either you’re banishing the ones who want to hurt people, or you’re setting free the ones that just got stuck here and haven’t been able to move on.”

He knew they both understood they’d been in their own little private hells of being trapped and unable to move on, and why he’d said it. She moved a little closer to him, and put her hand on his knee. Nothing meant as seduction, just something earnest, a human touch. She blew out a slow breath and said it. “Eliza’s pregnant. You know that?”

“I know. She told me.”

“Jake’s happier than I’ve seen him in a long time. I know it’s not a one way street, that we both helped make it fall apart in the end. But he’s been able to move on. Be happy again. So it feels like it was just me dragging him down.”

“Think I don’t get that? I can see that we both just grew up into different people. But I tell myself she’d wasted too many good years on me, and now she’s finally got the life she should have had all along.”

“There’s no banishment ritual for this kind of shit. I mean, I still do my share of therapy, and…yeah.”

“Me too. And no, there’s not. Just…quarantine.” Just burying himself in his work, both legal and paranormal, so that he could try to ignore that void inside of him, and ignore how he could get it done everywhere in his life except personally. How his worst failings were as a person, and those were the most unbearable ones. Hearing that smug, venomous little voice that told him just how much was wrong with him, and always had been. “I’m not good at talking about all this, all right? I…I don’t talk about it.”

That was part of the problem. He’d gotten so used to being around people who understood, who’d shared some of those traumas. There was no need to talk about it with them. But it meant he couldn’t even think how to frame some of it to Eliza, to a therapist, to anyone. Even with Sadie, he felt like he was still giving more facts rather than any kind of feeling, because she seemed to just understand the emotions and the boundaries. “It’s funny…” He hesitated, trying to dig deeper, to find the right words. “Miami was turning into the worst I’d felt in years, and then after I met you, turned out to be the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. But I could only let it happen if we put a timer on it. I could be happy, maybe make you happy, for a few days. Anything beyond that? The idea of it would have sent me running. Couldn’t ever believe I could go the distance.”

Her husky voice dropped to barely more than a whisper. “Yeah. Because how could I do anything but mess it up? Besides, hoping for anything real would hurt too fucking much.”

Something real. It felt far too fine, far too elusive, meant for good people who could make a lover happy for years and years. So they’d grabbed at fleeting joy, convinced it was all they could safely have. “We’re not good at casual. It’s all or nothing with me. I’m in or I’m out,” and it said something about how damn serious they were being that neither of them moved to quip about how he’d been in and out, repeatedly, and they’d both deeply enjoyed it. “And I’m guessing you’re the same way. Neither of us wanted to walk away, but we talked a good game.” They’d hastily rewritten the contract, so to speak, and told themselves they were being so admirably adult about it, not wanting to admit they were both clinging stubbornly and desperately to the most real thing they’d had in years. Because clinging was all they could manage, rather than embracing it.

She was right. Hope had hurt far too much, because the expectation of failure, of loss, dragged it down again. Far easier to just protect himself by trying to put clear boundaries on it, to tell himself he didn’t want the real thing anyway, and pretend he could walk away at the end. The trouble was that being around her had only made him want more. He’d given up, resigning himself to being a mess that nobody could understand or handle, an unfixable disaster. So long as he provided some kind of service, that was fine. He was pretty good at his job, and the paranormal one besides. But purely for companionship, as a person? Nothing to offer anyone. Quarantine, like she’d said. Not fit for other people.

But somehow she’d snuck into his little bubble–he’d let her as close as she dared, and she’d refused to back off, and he’d done the same for her. The happiest he’d been, he told her. That warred within him against the warning that he couldn’t see this through. That he still wasn’t ready for all that. He finally just said it, complicated and thorny as it felt, trusting that she’d hear him out. “Being around you? You make me want to be happy again. Start to think that maybe it’s even possible. But it’s not your job to fix me. It’s mine.”

She looked at him with those intense amber eyes and nodded. “I want that. Feeling good again. But I don’t want to be around someone who’s gonna feel like they failed me if I’m struggling. I don’t want to feel like I’m taking too much from you. I need to be able to make someone I’m with happy, not just let them make me happy.”

“Exactly.” Anyone else would have probably heard that as the end of things, assumed resignation and defeat. But he could sense they heard what was behind the words, that the two of them were once again in harmony. It was a not yet, not a no. He sighed, gave her a rueful smile. “My therapist’s gonna be so thrilled to hear this.” The man had long since accepted Arthur didn’t want to touch certain things, and they’d focused on the rest. But he’d have to tackle all the things he’d shoved away. Somehow, she made him want to try.

She laughed, a self-deprecating chuckle that touched something in his heart that he’d thought long since burnt to ashes. “Mine too.” She leaned in, brushed her lips across his, a gentle caress, and he answered it for just the fleeting moment it lasted. Not starting anything by it, no overture or invitation, but just…something. The tenderness of a promise of sorts. They’d hold off, and work on themselves, and be there for each other. No rush into any kind of sex or romance out of desperation. Unlike they’d told themselves in Miami, there would be time. He’d wait for her, as she would for him, and they’d see what happened. She stayed there, her forehead touching his, and with his eyes closed, he felt her breath against his cheek, scared shitless but achingly happy all at the same time. “So we just take it as it comes. And if it never goes that way, I’m OK with that. You’re a good friend, no matter what.”

“Right back at you.” She settled down again beside him, in no hurry to leave. He put his arm around her, and she leaned in on his shoulder. Comfortable as ever, and he let himself just live in that sensation, not needing to justify it or shove it into a particular mental box. “So explaining this to Eliza and Jake’s gonna be fun.”

“Jake’s gonna get a kick out of it.”

“Eliza too.” Bless his ex-wife’s kind soul. She just wanted to see him happy again, as she’d told him more than once. She’d probably be ecstatic.

“Oh no. You know what that means.”

“Oh yeah. They’re absolutely going to be rooting for us to get together.” Somehow he couldn’t be annoyed by it, mostly just amused. “Shit, they’ll be thrilled we’re friends. And they won’t quite say they’re crossing their fingers for wedding bells, but you know they will be.”

“Wedding bells?”

“Please. Neither of us is getting any younger, and like I said, we don’t do things halfway, Sadie. We get together, we’re getting married. You know it and I know it.”

“Christ, Arthur, I like good sense, but I expect a better proposal than that if it gets there.”

“Duly noted.” Both of them were laughing by that point, and it felt good. Good in the way that felt light and easy, not good in the way that left him anxiously waiting for the price to pay for something far too fine.

“So, what are you doing next Saturday?”

“No plans. You?”

“Got a contract.”

“Do tell. Hopefully something less spicy than Mr. O’Malley. Never let it be said I show a woman a good time.”

She elbowed him in the ribs for that self-deprecation, recognizing he’d twisted the usual saying. “Stop. Just make the next one you take us on a regular annoying ghost, that’s all.”

“Deal.” There was one on a farm on the Eastern Shore that sounded like a nuisance dvorovoi, spooking the livestock and messing up the farm machinery. That would make for a much more low-key job. He could do it alone easily enough, true, but why should he? The company would be welcome–well, all right, the company would be welcome since it was her. The next one you take us on, she’d said. Already making plans, and so was he.

She went on, “This one’s no guaranteed exorcism. This figure of a woman who’s been spotted in an old tavern, colonial era. They actually like her being there. I told them I’d do the research to try to figure out who she might be, and see if she wants to talk. If she’s happy there, so be it, she can stick around and impress the tourists. But if she wants to go, we’re letting her go. The owners agreed on that.”

“Sounds like fun. I’ll buy dinner if it’s a fast one, breakfast if it’s not.” He didn’t know exactly where this would go, but as she said, it didn’t truly matter. They would be together, and he was better off for having met Sadie. Somehow, she had made one of the most miserably lonely days of his life turn into one of the best. Hope hurt, yes, but it beckoned to him all the same, and this time he wasn’t going to turn away.