The House Across the Lake(57)

“It’s just no longer a good fit,” Boone says. “You know that saying, ‘Old habits die hard’? It’s true. Especially when everyone you know still has those habits. Being a cop is a stressful job. It takes a lot to unwind after a shift. Beers after work. Drinks during weekend barbecues. I just needed to get away from all of that. Otherwise I would have had one of those cartoon devils always sitting on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that it’s fine, it’s just one drink, nothing bad will happen. I knew I couldn’t live like that, so I got away. Now I scrape by doing odd jobs, and I’m happier now, believe it or not. I wasn’t happy for a very long time. It just took hitting rock bottom for me to realize it.”

I give the popsicle a halfhearted lick and wonder if I’ve already reached rock bottom or if I still have some distance left to fall. Worse, I consider the possibility that getting fired from Shred of Doubt was the bottom, and now I’m somewhere below that, burrowing down to a sublevel from which I’ll never emerge.

“Maybe things would have been different if we’d had kids,” Boone says. “I probably wouldn’t have hit the bottle so hard after my wife died. Having someone else to take care of forces you to be less selfish. I mean, we wanted kids. And we certainly tried. It just never happened.”

“Len and I never talked about it,” I say, which is true. But I suspect he wanted kids, and that it was part of his plan to live at the lake house full-time. I also suspect he knew I didn’t want them, mostly because I didn’t want to inflict the same kind of psychological damage my mother had caused me.

It ended up being for the best. While I’d like to think I would have kept my shit together after Len was gone if a child had been in the picture, I doubt it. I might not have fallen apart so quickly and so spectacularly. A long, slow unraveling instead of my very public implosion. Either way, I have a feeling I would have ended up exactly where I am now.

“Do you miss it?” I say.

Boone takes a bite of his ice cream, stalling. He knows I’m no longer talking about being a cop.

“Not anymore,” he eventually says. “At first I did. A lot. Those first few months, man. They’re hard. Like, it’s the only thing you can think about. But then a day passes, and then a week, and then a month, and you start to miss it less and less. Soon you don’t even think about it because you’re too distracted by the life you could have been living all this time but weren’t.”

“I don’t think it’s that easy.”

Boone lowers his Drumstick and shoots me a look. “Really? You’re doing it right now. When was the last time you had a drink?”

I’m shocked I need to think about it—and not because I’ve been drinking so much that I’ve forgotten. At first, I’m certain I had something to drink today. But then it hits me that my most recent drink was a double dose of bourbon last night before Googling Tom and Katherine Royce on my laptop.

“Last night,” I say, suddenly and furiously craving a drink. I suck on my Bomb Pop, hoping it will quench my thirst. It doesn’t. It’s too cloying and missing that much-needed kick. The ice pop version of a Shirley Temple.

Boone notices my obvious distaste. Holding out his half-eaten Drumstick, he says, “You don’t seem to like yours. Want to try some of mine?”

I shake my head. “I’m good.”

“I don’t mind. I’m pretty sure you don’t have cooties.”

I lean in and take a small bite from the side, getting half ice cream, half cone.

“I loved those as a kid,” I say.

“Me, too.” Boone looks at me again. “You have some ice cream on your face.”

I touch my lips, feeling for it. “Where? Here?”

“Other side,” he says with sigh. “Here, let me get it.”

Boone touches an index finger to the corner of my mouth and slowly runs it over the curve of my bottom lip.

“Got it,” he says.

At least, I think that’s what he says. My heart’s beating too fast and too loudly in my ears to know for sure. Even as everything gets fluttery, I know this was all a move on Boone’s part. A smooth one. But a move all the same. So much more calculated than Len’s shy honesty that day at the airport.

Can I get a kiss first?

I was willing to go there then. Not so much now. Not yet.

“Thanks,” I say, scooting to the side to put a few more inches between us. “And thank you for earlier today. For distracting Tom long enough to let me slip out of the house.”

“It was nothing.”

“And thank you for not telling Wilma about that. I imagine you wanted to. The two of you seem close.”

“We are, yeah.”

“Did you work together?”

“We did, but I knew Wilma long before that,” Boone says. “We went to school together, both high school and the police academy. She’s helped me out a lot over the years. She was one of the people who convinced me to quit drinking. She made me realize I was hurting others and not just myself. And now that I’m sober, she still keeps an eye out for me. She’s the one who introduced me to the Mitchells. She knew they needed work done on their house and that I needed a place to crash for a few months. So you can blame her for saddling you with me as a neighbor.”