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“Three hours? Jesus, Mark.” He crouched at the dry edge and looked at me the way one looks at a dog that’s been into the trash. “You’ve got the face of a man who did a lot of thinking. You worry me when you think.”

I dropped the wrench. It hit the water and splashed me directly in the face.

Finn grinned and watched me wipe ice-machine runoff out of my eyes and didn’t offer to help.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing at all,” he said a little too merrily, and went to start the coffee, which was the single most alarming thing Finn O’Brien could’ve done, not giving me shit.

By nine o’clock, the lagoon was mostly a memory, and the repair guy had made promises I chose not to believe. I’d changed into the emergency pants I kept in my office for exactly this genre of morning. Yes, at forty-eight, I had a contingency wardrobe. My father would’ve been so proud.

Benji arrived at nine-fifteen with hair a color that hadn’t existed the day before.

“Morning, lovelies!” He dropped his bag onto the bar. “Why’s there a wrench up here?”

“Don’t touch the wrench,” I growled.

“I’m not touching your wrench. I’m asking about your wrench. Those are different.” He leaned both elbows on the stainless steel counter and looked at me with the frank, wide-open curiosity of someone who had never once had a thought and kept it to himself. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you.”

“Not your face. I’ve made peace with your face. You look terrible structurally, like a parking garage they’ve condemned but can’t afford to knock down.”

Across the kitchen, Finn snorted.

I counted to three.

It was a thing I did, especially when Benji was present.

“That’s a compliment,” he said. “People love old buildings. There’s a whole preservation society.” He tilted his head. “Rough night?”

And there was where I made my mistake.

“Nope.”

It would’ve been fine if I’d said it at a normal speed and a normal volume, like a man reporting a boring fact. Instead, it came out fast and bright and about a third of an octave above my usual register, the audio equivalent of a man diving behind a couch to avoid bullets.

Benji’s whole face lit up.

“Oh!” he breathed. “Oh, that was a guilty ‘nope.’”

“It was a regular ‘nope.’”

“Mark, sweetheart, I’ve been lied to by professionals.” He was already climbing onto a stool, already settling in, the way you settle into a comfy seat before the start of a movie you’ve been waiting to see. “That was a ‘nope’ with a floor plan.”

“The ice machine broke.”

“That’s not where you were at midnight.”

I opened my mouth to say he didn’t know where I was at midnight, and then didn’t, because the not-saying was already an answer, and we both heard it.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” He grabbed the edge of the counter with both hands. “You went somewhere.”

“I go lots of places.”

“Was there a man?”

“There’s no man.”