I found Elise on the back porch after dinner. Everyone else had cleared out for the night, and she was sitting on the top step with a mug of something she wasn't drinking, looking out at the tree line.
"Hey," I said.
She looked up. "Hey yourself."
I sat down next to her. Not close. There was a careful amount of space we'd both gotten good at leaving between us, and neither of us said anything about it, we just did it.
"You okay?" she asked. "You've had a face on you all day."
"Had a lot on my mind."
"Same." She wrapped both hands around the mug. "Rhys thinks I'm distracted by the Hargrove case."
"Are you?"
"No," she said it flat. "I haven't thought about that case in a week."
We sat there a minute. Somewhere off in the trees an owl was doing its thing, and the porch light behind us buzzed a little, and I kept turning over how to start this and coming up with nothing that sounded right in my head.
So I decided to just say it.
