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He didn’t know what to do with any of it.
For two years, he’d stood at that door and kept everyone at the polite arm’s length, and there was Jacks with his whole heart out and Benji vibrating and Finn’s quiet approving nod. Dante looked, for one unguarded second, like a man who’d been standing outside a window his whole life and just found out the door had never been locked.
He caught me watching.
I didn’t look away.
His jaw did a thing, and something went soft behind his eyes.
I knew I’d remember that exact look, that precise moment, when I was an old man.
“All right,” Finn said, taking pity. “Let the poor men breathe. They’re not used to being liked out loud.”
“We had a pool,” Benji said, wiping his eyes. “You should know that. There’s money involved. Peter had July. Adrian had, ‘Never, they’re both too repressed.’ Adrian’s going to be devastated. He put twenty dollars’ worth of pastries on you two dying alone—”
“Thanks?” Dante’s brow furrowed.
“That’s a beautiful thing to bet on,” I snarked.
“Rod had the ice machine going before either of you, so emotionally Rod won, but Finn won the actual—”
“Where is Rod?” Dante said.
Rod wasn’t in the huddle.
I walked to the kitchen door, the pack following, to find Rod standing at Reina with a clean rag in one hand and the face of a detective in the shows my mother used to watch.
He was crouched. He was studying her flank. And on the polished steel, clear in the morning light, was a print, the unmistakable pressed shape of a large man’s bare back. It was my bare back, to be specific, from where Dante had walked me into Raina with my shirt around my chest and my brain somewhere over the Gulf.
Rod touched the cold metal, reverent and grim. He measured the smear against his own hand. He stepped back and took in the whole scene of the crime.
“Somebody,” Rod said quietly, “has been on my queen.”
The bar family went very still. Beside me, Dante stopped breathing.
“Rod,” Benji started, “buddy, maybe we—”
“No.” Rod held up a hand but didn’t look away from the streak. “No, this is back. You see? Shoulders here.” He traced the air above it, not touching, preserving the scene. “Big man. Big man was pressed here, against her, and I want to know who. I want to know why nobody woke chef. I want to know—” His voice caught, wounded to the soul. “—who did not respect her.”
“Maybe somebody just leaned—” Jacks tried.
“Nobody leans like this, Jacks.” Rod rounded on the room. He’d never looked more serious in his life, not at the funeral, not over the spheres, never. “This is not lean. This is whole back. This is intimacy. Somebody was doing things, against Reina, in my kitchen, and I am going to find out who.”
He pulled out his phone. He photographed the print. He photographed it from two angles.
“I will investigate. Backs are like faces. Every back is different. When I find back that defiled my baby girl”—he pointed the phone around the room, at me, at Dante, at the whole gathered family, missing it entirely—“there will be justice. Reina’s honor will be restored. This villain will answer to me.”
Nobody said a word. What words were there, really, for an ice machine sexual harassment accusation?
I couldn’t look at Dante. Thank God, Dante didn’t look at me. If we’d looked at each other, we were both going to die, right there, and Rod would investigate that, too.
“Take all the time you need, buddy,” I managed.
“I intend to,” Rod said darkly, and went back to studying the print like a man reading scripture.
Benji made a sound into his own fist. Finn walked away with his shoulders shaking, stifling the Irish laughter I knew was begging to pour out of him. I stood in the middle of my bar, the most wanted man in a crime I’d committed against a beloved appliance.
Somehow, we made it through the evening shift. Benji recovered enough to be insufferable, Jacks kept grinning at us like we’d personally cured something, Finn collected forty dollars from a wounded-looking Benji and forty more off a text to Peter, and Rod moved through the night with the quiet, burdened dignity of a man exploring a case no one else was taking seriously.
