And then…and then…

Cold afternoon sunlight streamed into the room. Under the bed, something glinted.

Emilie lay on her stomach and flipped onto her back like a mechanic about to perform an oil change.

There it was. Just as Jeremy had said, the silver chain of her mother’s necklace had gotten caught in a slat.

She held it in her palm, her whole body shivering. Could he have planted it? She’d told no one but him it was missing, and even then, only about ten minutes ago. No, the house was locked up tight.

She walked out to the porch and held up the necklace.

“How?”

“Lucky guess,” he said. Jeremy held out his hand, and she gave him the necklace. He spun his finger. She turned and let him clasp it around her neck. “But let’s just say…I’m luckier than most people.”

“Nobody’s that lucky,” she said.

“Do you trust me now?”

Having her mother’s necklace back felt like having her mother’s blessing.

“Starting to,” she said. “You can come in. Want some coffee?”

“More than life itself.”

—

She left him in the living room and went into the kitchen. While the coffee percolated, she returned to the living room and found Jeremy taking off his jacket while staring through the bars of the enormous four-level rat cage filled with toys, mazes, and even a little rat castle.

“This cage would rent for two thousand a month in Brooklyn,” he said as he tossed his jacket onto the back of the armchair.

“It is not a cage. It is Fritz’s sanctuary.”

“You think the rats that live in sewers resent the one-percenter rats that live in castles?”

“At the vet clinic, we always said, ‘You can’t save them all, but today we will save one.’ Kept you going on the rough days.”

He nodded. “Good point. Excellent point.”

She opened the little door. Fritz, white with gray spots, ran out to her hand and scrambled up her sleeve to sit on her shoulder. “You aren’t afraid of rats, are you?”

“Only the two-legged kind.” He held out his hand to pet Fritz, but her rat took it as an invitation and crawled into Jeremy’s palm. “Hello, Fritz,” he said, his tone dry as the Sahara Desert.

She watched him intently, making sure he wouldn’t accidentally hurt Fritz, but Jeremy did a good job, holding him with one hand close to his chest and petting him with the other. She didn’t trust people who didn’t like her rat, and so far, Jeremy Cox was passing the Fritz test.

“He likes you,” Emilie said.

“How can you tell?”

Half a hoodie string landed on the floor. She hoped it wasn’t an expensive hoodie.

“He just chewed through your hoodie string instead of your finger. I go through two charger cords a week.”

“What’s all this?” He nodded toward the piles of books on the fireplace mantel. Do You Dare?—A Manual for Finding Your Courage. Braver Every Day. The Personal Power Handbook. How the Lamb Became a Lion…

“Oh, um, I need to get some of that stuff back to the library. With Mom gone, I guess, you know, I’ve just been trying to find myself.”

Holding Fritz nose-first like a pointer, he made a show of counting the books. Seven in total.

“Find yourself? How many of you are there?”

She glared at him. “I felt kind of bad about bringing up Ralph Howell yesterday after I swore I wouldn’t. I don’t feel bad anymore.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Good. Now give me my rat back.”

“Goodbye, Fritz,” he said and relinquished him, she noticed, a little reluctantly. “I need to see everything you have on Shannon.”

“It’s all in the dining room. I’ll get the coffee.”

Emilie went into the kitchen and took two large white mugs from the cabinet. As she was adding cream and sugar to hers, she heard piano music. Live piano music.

They had an old upright piano, but Emilie rarely thought about it. Her mother had treated it like a second mantel, perfect for flower vases and picture frames. But Jeremy had opened the fallboard and was playing a few stray notes of some piece she didn’t recognize. It sounded like a spring storm to her—willows swaying in the wind, clouds racing across the sky, the waking earth eagerly drinking the dark gray rain…

His fingers paused on the keys, and he looked up at her as she stood in the doorway staring.

“Your piano is out of tune.”

“Neither of us played. It was Grandma’s. You’re good.”

“I’m crap compared to Mum. She was a classically trained pianist,” he said. “Concert level. Music professor at WVU. I never had to clean my room or do the dishes. All she ever asked of me was to get good grades and practice piano one hour a day.”

“Single mother?”

“Exactly.”

“Same.”

She gave him his mug, and they clinked them together in tribute to the women who’d spoiled them rotten.

“So…you find missing girls and play piano and you can guess where missing necklaces are…and…anything else I should know about? Olympic gymnast, maybe? Sew your own clothes? Parkour?”

“I ride horses. I can sword-fight. Fairly good at archery.”

“Sword fighting. Okay. You are unreal.”

“I had a strange upbringing,” he said.