It was evening when Vincent told me he was free to meet.

The phone rang three times and then he picked up. He answered with a formal, "This is Vincent speaking" and listened to me stumble over my words trying to explain what had happened over the phone. After a few seconds, he interrupted me to tell me it would be prefered if we met up to discuss what happened in person.

Unfortunately, he wasn't free at that very moment. I supposed he was doing other detective work. He told me he'd text me to let me know when we could meet. It was nearly six on the dot when he sent me the address of the same rooftop cafe we went to last time.

Meeting at this time was an issue because evenings were sacred in the Morales household. It was the time of day that everyone placed the things they had been doing aside and came together to eat dinner.

There was no easy way to get out of it. In all my years of living at the house, it didn't matter if we had exams to study for or work to get done. Try that excuse and we would hear Tìa say "You can spare half an hour of your time to spend with your family. We are the most important thing in your life." Julio and Nancy were the ones who pushed on the rule frequently. They learned that the best method to get out of family dinner was to announce you would miss it in advance - days in advance. I did not have that option.

It would be a hard thing to pull off but I couldn't tell Vincent that my aunt and uncle were keeping me in. I was twenty four not fourteen. It would be ridiculous to let some rule keep me in. Sometimes exceptions had to be made.

I went down stairs wearing my laptop carrier on my shoulder. I had the uncontrollable urge to smile and be pleasant as I entered the kitchen. It was not a matter of simply stating where I was going and leaving but rather lulling my family into a cheerful mood to then plead my case.

Tìa was setting dishes down on the table while Tìo stirred a pot on the stove. The smell of chicken broth wafted over to me as Julio held out his open bag of chips.

"No thanks." I readjusted the strap of my laptop carrier though it was perfectly placed on my shoulder. I was hoping someone would say it for me, that they would point out the obvious and say I wasn't staying for dinner. No one was.

"I have to go out and meet someone for work. They called at the last minute."

The bowl my aunt set at the table fell early from her grip, causing it to teeter around in a circle and make a resounding echo before it settled in place.

"The author of the book you're working on?" she asked, resting her hands on the waist of her dress.

Now was the time to introduce them to the concept of Vincent. I hoped I wouldn't mess it up.

"No. Actually I have an editing partner for this new book I am working on."

Tìa ran a hand over her short, waved hair. "Two editors for one book? Did you need extra help with the workload or something?"

"It wasn't that." I immediately feared what she may have been thinking. She probably thought everything with Adonis was making me neglect my job, like this editing partnership was the preface to me getting fired for not being able to keep up. "The writer I'm working for just requested two from the get go and we were both assigned."

Nancy strolled in behind me. She tugged my bag strap on her way in and laughed as I jumped in surprise.

"What were you assigned to?" she asked. She held out her hand to Julio who hadn't offered her any chips. Reluctantly, he shook out as little as possible into her palm.

"She has an editing partner now," Tìo answered, dropping his wooden spoon onto the side of the stove. He wiped his hands on his apron and gave me a lazy smile. "Apparently this person has no respect for family dinner time."

He appeared relaxed but I was still in anticipation of a larger reaction.

"Well, if you have to go you have to go," Tìa said. "Just make sure they know they can't make a habit of scheduling meetings at the last minute. It's unfair."

I exhaled. "Right. I'll see you all later."

It wasn't nearly as hard as I had made it seem it would be. I had to stop doing that - making things worse in my head.

"Wait, let me drive you," Nancy said. The clang of metal on glass filled the air as she fished her car keys out of the bowl on the counter. "It's getting too dark out to walk."

"Or I can take the car and drive myself so you don't have to miss dinner."

Julio chuckled as if he was able to read Nancy's mind and heard what she was going to say before she said it.

"Yeah, right. You're a horrible driver."

I opened my mouth to protest this - especially since I had never once crashed the car or got a ticket unlike Nancy - but she was already shrugging on her jacket.

Nancy put the address of the cafe into her GPS and as we drove, silence fell over us. The radio turned on the moment she started the car but the volume was low enough to forget it was playing in the first place. The streets of our town were already familiar to me, making staring out the window at them a bore. My eyes drifted to Nancy. The shirt she wore fit weird on her. It was loose and tight in all the wrong places. It had to be Adonis's.

So she did keep some of his things, I thought.

I had gotten the impression she had wiped nearly every trace of him from her belongings but I was wrong. I was tempted to ask her about the watch I found at the thrift store. I wondered if she could tell me if he wore it at the wedding.

As curious as I might have been, Nancy had a lot on her plate at the moment. She didn't need me reminding of her husband's gruesome end. Maybe that was part of the reason I hadn't wanted her to drive me to see Vincent. He would probably want to use the opportunity to meet her and it would feel wrong considering the truth behind who he was. I wanted to keep Nancy from it, at least while she processed her pregnancy.

Vincent was standing outside the cafe this time. Perhaps he was secretly scarred by our elevator interaction and wanted to avoid another awkward mishap. He watched our car stop in the parking space in front of the building.

"Is that him?" Nancy asked.

"Yeah, his name is Vincent." I unbuckled my seatbelt and collected my things as quickly as I could.

"He's kind of attractive." She tilted her head to the side, her ponytail swishing to the left with her. "If you squint and look at him at an angle, that is."

"Don't say that," I snapped. She glanced at me, her eyebrows furrowed. "That was uncalled for and untrue."

It set me off that Nancy had made such an unwarranted comment about someone she didn't even know. It was mean.

"Wow, so quick to defend him," she said with a roll of her eyes. "Have fun with your hot editing partner."

She unlocked my door from her side of the car. I shot her a glare as I began to step out. I hadn't realized it but while we were speaking, Vincent had walked over to our vehicle and was now opening the door for me. A plastic smile formed on Nancy's face.

"Hey Vincent," I said, trying for a more genuine smile than Nancy's. "This is my sister, Nancy. She was just dropping me off."

Vincent's acting skills stunned me again. He had brought props this time. He was wearing a leather messenger bag and a pencil was stuck behind his ear. Then, it occured to me that this didn't have to be acting. Maybe this was how he arrived to work at the station all the time. He could have naturally been suited to the writer's aesthetic.

"Nice to meet you, Nancy," he said, with a wave. He was bent over to see into the car and appeared so geeky that it was hard to imagine him wielding a gun or interrogating anyone.

"Your Mickey's new editing partner, I hear."

It irked me that Nancy had to mention it. It was as if she was trying to corroborate our stories.

"Yes. This book is a rather long one. At first I was averted to editing with someone else but now I'm glad I don't have to sort through so many pages alone." Vincent chuckled though nothing he said was particularly funny. He was coming off as awkward and Nancy was getting more bored by the second. Maybe that was a strategic move. No one would suspect he was anything more than my coworker if he was a plain character.

"Do you have a similar job as your sister?"

"No, no. I'm a receptionist. Editing sounds like way too much work."

"It can be but it can also be interesting." Vincent squinted at the watch on his wrist and then gestured at the cafe. "Well, we better get to it. Nice meeting you."

"Likewise."

I let the car door close and watched as Nancy pulled away from the cafe.

"So, now you've met my sister."

Vincent inhaled deeply, his posture becoming more stiff the farther the car drove. He looked down at me.

"How is she doing?"

I started in the direction of the cafe to give us something to do. I would have much rather walked and talked then stood in the middle of the parking lot with Vincent. Things with him tended to be awkward no matter what so it was better not to add any unsavory elements.

"She seemed like she had it all together at first. Sad but not crumbling apart."

He held the door to the cafe open for me.

"Seemed?"

"Yeah. She got rid of Adonis's things and has been working like normal. I thought the worst of it was over but . . ." I hesitated. I felt like I was oversharing. He had asked a simple question and I was giving him the rundown of everything that had been happening in Nancy's life. At the same time, wasn't that what I was supposed to do? The more information he had about my family, the more he'd see how innocent we were.

"There's been a recent development," I finished.

"What kind of development?"

We stopped in front of the elevator and waited for the doors to open.

"Nancy's pregnant."

Vincent turned around to face me completely, his mouth slightly agape. "Oh. How has she taken that?"

"She's scared. She feels alone. It's definitely a surprise."

"I can only imagine."

The elevator doors dinged open and we entered. We stood on opposite sides like we had last time, each looking in a different direction, me at the ceiling and Vincent at the floor. It was less awkward this time. This time I was actually thinking and not just spiraling about how awkward it was.

When we were seated at a table, the same one as last time coincidentally, he said, "So, tell me about what happened at the thrift store."

We had our laptops out on the desk even though we weren't using them. Vincent said it was a good measure to take just in case the anonymous caller had an eye on us. Though, he mentioned he hadn't noticed anyone following us or watching us thus far.

"I was shopping and got a phone call. It was the same person as last time but from a new number. They asked if I had seen Mac again and I said no."

He leaned forward, resting his chin on his fist. "So they didn't know he was a cop?"

"No. Then they said they hadn't seen anyone following me which means they have been watching me since then."

The thought disturbed me.

"Right. What else?"

"I asked them who they were or if they were really hired by someone. They avoided answering and told me that I was in danger- not my family but me specifically. They said dangerous people want me dead."

The panic I had felt when I had first heard it began to seize me again. I ran my finger nail along the table cloth to ground myself, focusing on the view on the roof.

The sky was turning a dark purple dotted with clouds. It was getting harder to see and just when I wondered how anyone was supposed to eat their food or drink their beverage in the dark, the lights strung up around the perimeter of the roof lit up. They were like little stars wrapping us up in their light.

Vincent sat back in his seat with his hands laying on the top of the table. "Only you, huh?"

I tried to figure out what he was thinking. He must have thought that made me seem guilty. If the people from the drug trafficking operation were after me then it had to mean that I did something to make them angry. He probably thought I was involved. Maybe he thought I was at the center of it all. Did that mean he would stop working with me?

"And you've been honest with me about everything you know about Adonis? You haven't held anything back?"

I shook my head. It felt too risky to speak.

He scratched his chin and remained quiet for a long time, so long that the waitress stopped by to give us our orders. A few seconds after she left, Vincent's unreadable expression became weaved with kindness. It looked good on him. I hadn't imagined a face like his could hold that much warmth.

"We won't let them harm you," he said.

I wanted to say he couldn't make a promise like that. He could have said that he and his colleagues would try to protect me. I believed they would. I was somehow at the center of a big case of interest and therefore, I was valuable. Yet, they couldn't be everywhere at the same time. If these people got to Adonis at a crowded wedding, they could get to me anywhere.

__________________

The stars were out when Vincent walked me home.

When he offered to take me home, I assumed he meant by car but when we walked past the parking lot and onto the sidewalk, I realized we were going on foot.

It was good weather at least. The air was cool in an exhilarating kind of way. There was the kind of chill that was enough to spare you from needing a jacket without feeling warm. The stars were out and became more visible the farther away from Main street we got. The occasional street lamp lit us up, casting a shadow of the two of us strolling side by side.

Vincent was a bit more talkative than usual. Perhaps it was because he knew we would be walking for a while or maybe he was warming up to me. I wasn't sure.

He was speaking about the weekly games of volleyball he played at the community center when a loud crackling sound cut him off. The invasion of the still night caught me by surprise. It had gone from the soothing chirps of crickets to the roar of an engine in a flash of an instant. The motorcycle zipped by us and I couldn't help but jump.

The two of us had paused under a lampost and thus my cowering was put on display. I ducked my head, embarrassed. All I could do was try and beat Vincent from commenting on it.

"Sorry, I don't know why that startled me. You probably have nerves of steel from all the detective work you do, right?" I was laughing but Vincent wasn't. He was walking again, a strange expression on his face.

"You just apologized to me for getting scared," he said. He let the statement hang between us before continuing. "And no, I get shaken up sometimes. One time . . ."

I let myself wander closer to his side. He was hesitating and that worried me. Whatever he was about to say, I wanted to hear it. If there was a time when this stone face had been as spooked as I was after the wedding, then maybe I wasn't the problem. It might have meant that what I was experiencing was normal.

He glanced down at me and must have seen something in my expression that made him decide to continue.

"When I was a police officer," he said, sticking his hands into the pockets of his slacks, "I was called about a robbery."

Vincent's eyes were focused on the lawns of the houses we passed, their grass a deeper shade of green as they soaked in the night. Somehow, I didn't think he was really seeing the grass anymore. His voice sounded distant.

"When the other officers and I arrived on the scene, the robbers started to flee. I lost them for a second and then one of the men popped out of a corner. It was all so sudden. It was over in less than a second. He -" Vincent's voice hitched. "He had his gun pointed at me."

I sucked in a breath. In my head, I saw the image blurred by fading memory. My father pointed a gun at my mother. I pictured Adonis staring down the barrel of a gun. Both events had changed me yet I myself had never been the target. I had the urge to comfort Vincent but I didn't know how or thought I had the right to.

He cleared his throat and righted his posture, continuing with an exaggerated put together attitude. It was too late for that. I had caught a glimpse of him and was committing it to memory.

"I shot him first. He died instantly."

There was a momentary lull in the chirping of the crickets. It was as if they were even listening now. I stopped walking without meaning to and so did Vincent. He turned towards me, staring me straight in the eyes as he spoke. His eyelashes caught the light from a nearby lamppost and fragmented the stream of illumination along his face.

"The guilt crept in slowly. I became obsessed with finding out more about that man, his life, just family. I couldn't work for weeks. When I did come back to work, everyone was looking at me strangely. They were waiting for me to break. It was awful."

I wanted to say I understood those looks. I got them all the time. But Vincent probably knew that. It was probably why he was telling me this.

"How did you get through it?" I asked and it wasn't an empty attempt to keep the conversation going. I needed to know.

"Time passed and I changed careers." He shrugged. "It still bothers me. I carry it with me and I think I always will."

"Thank you," I said. "For telling me that."

He smiled to himself and we continued the walk in a comfortable silence. He stopped at the beginning of my block and promised not to leave until he saw me get inside.

As I microwaved the food my Tìa saved me from dinner, I thought about what Vincent said. I thought about how successful he turned out to be, how he seemed to be doing fine. I wanted that for myself.

It wasn't jealousy or envy that I felt. It was something different. It was admiration. 

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