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The late sun lay across the road. Someone farther down the block was dragging a trash can back up a driveway. The wheels rattled over the seams in the concrete.

There was nothing unusual to watch.

Chief kept watching anyway.

“I’m not going to run off,” I said.

He looked at me. “I know.”

I wasn’t sure he believed it.

For a while, neither of us said anything.

Then he rested his forearms on his knees and looked at his hands.

“Megan told me she talked to you,” he said. “About giving me some room.”

My stomach tightened. I asked, “That was what she called about?”

He nodded.

“She told me what she said,” he said, mouth tightening around the last words. “She thought she was helping me.”

I looked toward the street, at the sky.

There wasn’t anything out there that helped.

“I thought you knew,” I admitted.

He turned toward me fully. “I didn’t.”

I could hear Mom moving around the kitchen through the open front window.

My whole life felt very close and very far away.

“I thought you’d told her,” I said. “Not to talk to me. Just how you felt. I thought she’d let it slip.”

Chief looked at me for a long time. Then he lowered his eyes.

“I never told her that,” he said. “But I know why you believed it.”

I hadn’t expected him to admit that part.

It left me with nothing prepared to say.

“She doesn’t know what I think about you,” he continued. “I haven’t been talking to her about you. She had no business deciding what you should do for my sake.” He sounded disgusted. Then he looked at the mark beneath the edge of my sleeve and lowered his head.

I pulled the sleeve down without thinking.

His eyes followed the movement.

I let my hand fall. “What did you say to her?” I asked.

“I’m done with her.”

Nothing followed it.

He wasn’t watching to see whether that pleased me. He had already looked back at my arm.