There was so much to unpack in that sentence. I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that Keme not only could talk, but that he did talk—apparently, at length—to just about everyone except me. The fact that he slept rough when he wasn’t sleeping in the coach house was news to me; one of the first things I’d learned about Keme was that he had a bad home life, but maybe that had been assuming too much. I was starting to think Keme didn’t have a home.
“I might say something, actually,” I said. “I have the slight advantage that he won’t actually scream at me, since he doesn’t talk to me in general. And I’d like him to graduate high school, preferably so he can go to college somewhere far, far away from here.”
“Good luck,” Indira said.
“He might get angry, sure. But someone needs to tell him.”
“Better you than me.”
“I mean, we’re friends. What’s he going to do? Beat me up? Silently?”
Indira patted my hand. Somehow, that made it so much worse.
“Maybe Deputy Bobby can tell him,” I said. “Maybe he can say it, and then he can get in his car and drive away. Although then Keme might run after him and hang onto the car, Terminator style. Of course, that won’t work because Deputy Bobby probably won’t ever talk to me again.”
Indira patted my hand again.
So, of course, I told her what I’d left out before: the fight with Deputy Bobby.
“And he was just such a—such a man about it,” I said when I finished. “It makes me want to scream.”
Indira looked like she was trying not to smile.
“I know,” I said sourly. “I’m aware of the irony.”
“I’m sure you are, dear.”
“It was totally out of line. And inappropriate. And probably illegal. And he has no right to be snooping into my personal life, or trying to control what I do, or judging me for who I want to date.”
“Do you want to date this Damian fellow?”
“I don’t know. No, probably not. He seems like he’d want to get high and listen to Jack Johnson and go to parties all the time. It would be horrible.”
Indira made a small, polite noise that might have meant anything.
“But you know what? It’s nice to have someone be interested in me and not have that person be a murder suspect, or a murder victim, or—or living in their mom’s basement and trying to convince me that ‘online gamer’ is a real job.”
“And he looked like quite the stone fox.”
I blinked.
“Millie sent me a picture,” Indira said.
“What kind of life am I living? How did I end up in this micro-dystopia? Don’t answer that.”
“Are you going to text him? He might not be boyfriend material, but sometimes, Dash, I think you’re lonely. And it can be nice to feel appreciated.”
“I don’t know. I mean, it is kind of—it was for sexual assault, you know? The arrest. Maybe that’s not fair to him, but it does kind of worry me.”
Indira made that same small noise again.
“Oh no,” I said. “No way. Deputy Bobby was still way out of line.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”
I stared at her. There was nothing I could read on her face. “Why couldn’t he have, you know, pretended to ask for permission first? Or he could have lied. He could have told me it came up when they were investigating Gerry’s death.”
“Because Bobby isn’t a liar.”
In the distance, waves broke against the sea cliffs.
“He knew what he was doing,” I finally said. “And he knew it was wrong.”
With a nod, Indira sat forward and said, “That should tell you something about Bobby. Let me ask you a question: would you be this angry if it had been someone else?”
“What?”
“If someone else had brought you this information. If Millie had known Damian’s reputation because, as usual, Millie knew everything about this town. Or if Fox had figured it out—probably from rewatching another season of Law & Order. Or if I’d recognized him from somewhere else. Or if Keme had known because all the surfers talked about him.”
It took me too long to say, “But it wasn’t any of those things. And Deputy Bobby didn’t just know. He had to go looking for it. Because he thinks I can’t take care of myself. Because he thinks I’ve got terrible judgment in men. Because he thinks I need—I need to be fixed or taken care of or something. And I don’t need that. I certainly don’t need that from him, not when he can’t even handle his own—”
I managed to stop myself. A flush made me pull at my jacket, and sweat prickled under my arms.
“Do you really believe Bobby thinks those things about you?” Indira asked.
I didn’t answer.
“I won’t pretend I know what he thinks,” Indira said, “or that I know everything that’s been said between you two. It’s possible he’s told you something, or expressed in some way I haven’t seen, that he thinks those things. But from what I have seen, I can tell you that you are one of the most important people in Bobby’s life.”
