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He is becoming socialized.

But still he fears Dinner with the Family. Her father is a bankruptcy lawyer. Her older sister is a domestic machine who produces
baked goods and offspring at an alarming rate. Her brother has a Subaru and a weave belt. He gives to charity and complains
about taxes, the kind of guy who probably played multigenerational baseball at the park around the time Mike and Shep were
boosting Bomb Pops and urinating on Schwinns.

Mike minds his silverware, his elbows, his napkin in his lap. He thinks of those few domestic memories he has held on to –
sage incense in a yellow-tiled kitchen, his mother’s tan skin, the dust-and-oil smell of the station wagon’s cloth seats.
He feels uncomfortable, unworthy of sitting here at a nicely set table in a nice home. The parents, none too enamored, seem
to agree. When her father passes the butter, he asks, ‘Where did you go to
college?’ and Mike smiles nervously and says, ‘I didn’t.’ The rest of dinner is consumed by stories of successful friends
and neighbors who never went to college and were successful
anyway
, the two other siblings swapping anecdotes while the parents chew and sip and shoot each other shrewd glances. Annabel has
to contain her laughter at the absurdity of it all, and when they leave, she says, ‘I will never make you do that again.’

The next week, at dinner, she fiddles with her watercress. Her face is tight and flushed and quite unhappy. He braces himself
for the speech he has been fearing. And sure enough she comes at him hard. ‘What are we
doing
here?’ She tosses down her fork with a clatter. ‘I mean, I don’t want to do this whole casual-dating thing—’

‘I don’t either.’

She bulldozes ahead, undeterred. ‘—where we agree we’re allowed to see other people—’

‘I don’t want to see anyone else.’

‘—and I pretend I’m okay with it.’

‘I’m not okay with it.’

‘I’m too old for that shit. I need security, Mike.’

‘Then marry
me.’

This time, finally, she hears.

They don’t drink a drop of liquor at the ceremony but feel drunk with joy. The service is brief, some pictures after on the
courthouse steps, Mom and Dad doing their best to muster smiles.

As he helps her mother gingerly into the car at the night’s end, she pauses in a rare unfiltered moment, dress hem in hand,
and says, ‘The thing that doesn’t add up with you – you’re so gentle.’ He replies, ‘I spent enough years being not.’

He works hard, is promoted to foreman. In what is the single best day of his life, their daughter is born. She was to be Natalie,
but when they meet her, she is Katherine, so forms must be reprocessed to ensure she has her proper name.

They settle into an apartment in Studio City. Prints of water lilies, matching linens, little seashell soaps for the bathroom.
Through their back window, they can see the Wash, where the L.A. River drifts through concrete walls.

Out of the blue, Shep calls from a pay phone. It has been months – no, over a year. Both times he and Annabel met were excruciating,
Shep’s hearing putting a damper on what little conversation could be summoned. Annabel is protective of Mike, all too aware
of the costs of the sentence he served, and Shep doesn’t understand her; she is simply beyond his frame of reference. Mike
remembers only long silences and sullen sips of beer, him in the middle, sweating worse than he did at that first dinner with
her family.

Given Shep’s hearing, this phone conversation, like all others, is awkward, filled with starts and stops. Shep has heard that
Mike has a daughter, and he wants to come by. Kat is five months old, and Mike is nervous, still adjusting, but cannot bring
himself to say no.

Shep arrives two hours late, well after Kat is down. ‘Can I spend the night?’ he asks at the door, before saying hello. ‘I
have a thing going on with my place.’

Mike and Annabel manage nods.

From his pocket Shep withdraws a gift – a wadded, unwrapped onesie sized for a three-year-old. Mike hates himself for wondering
if it is stolen. He rubs his fingers over the butterfly pattern. It is the softest thing he has ever seen Shep hold.

Shep puts his feet on the coffee table and lights up, and Annabel says, apologetically, ‘Would you mind not smoking in here?
The baby.’

‘Right,’ Shep says. ‘Sorry.’ He walks to the window and leans out, blowing into the wind.

Annabel says to Mike, ‘I think I’m gonna grab some sleep while I can.’

Mike goes over to Shep, wanting him to say good night, to be
polite, to be gracious. He rests a hand on Shep’s back, still ridged with muscle. When Shep flicks his cigarette and turns,
Annabel is starting to pull out the couch bed, and he says quietly, ‘Don’t bother. I’ll just sleep on it like it is.’

‘It’s really no trouble.’

He pauses a moment, processing. ‘Couches are more comfortable,’ he says. ‘I sleep on a couch at home.’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Okay.’

They stare at each other, Shep pinching his St. Jerome pendant between his lips.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘Good night.’

Shep nods.

The bedroom door closes. Shep says, ‘Go get a drink?’ and Mike says, ‘I’m pretty beat. The baby has us up a couple times a
night, and I got work at five.’

Shep asks, ‘Can I have a key?’

At three in the morning, the front door opens and closes loudly; Shep never hears doors well. Annabel wakes with a start,
and Kat fusses through the monitor.

Mike stumbles out into the living room. Shep says, ‘Alcohol? Bandages?’

Drawing closer, Mike sees that his cheek has been badly raked by fingernails. He tilts Shep’s head, sees the white flesh glittering
through the blood. He gets one of the matching hand towels from the bathroom and soaks it in warm water. When Shep pats on
rubbing alcohol, he doesn’t so much as flinch. They have done this many a night – staying up, whispering, cleaning wounds.
For a moment Mike is lost in the sweet familiarity of the ritual. But the footsteps and movement wake Kat fully. Annabel emerges
from the bedroom, pauses on her way to the nursery. ‘What happened?’

Shep says, ‘Crowded bar. I was having trouble, you know . . .’ He gestures to an ear. Mike has never known him to speak directly
about his hearing problem, and he isn’t about to start
now. ‘Guy was playing with me. Sneaking up. He had a lot of friends. He sucker-punched me. The rest didn’t go down how they
wanted. His girlfriend jumped on my back somewhere in there. Cops showed up, so I split. It wasn’t my fault.’

Someone bellows outside, ‘You fuckin’ asshole, get out here! We’re gonna kill you!’

Kat is crying now in the nursery.

Mike says, ‘Did you hear that?’

Shep says, ‘What?’ Mike points to the window. Shep crosses and sticks his head out. An instant later a bottle shatters against
the wall near the window. The yelling, now a chorus, intensifies.

The phone rings, and Annabel snatches it up. ‘Yeah, sorry, Mrs. McDaniels.’ She points at the ceiling, in case Mike has forgotten
where the McDanielses live. ‘Everything’s okay,’ she says into the phone. ‘Just some drunk out there. We’ll handle it.’ She
hangs up, says to Mike, ‘I don’t want this going on here,’ and disappears into the nursery.

Shep withdraws his head from the window, wiping beer spray from his face. ‘Couple of his buddies must’ve followed me home,’
he says. ‘I’ll handle it.’

Calmly, he goes outside. Sitting on the couch, Mike lowers his face into his hands. There is a crash. And then another. Then
silence.

A moment later Shep reappears. ‘My bad,’ he says.

‘Look,’ Mike says, ‘maybe you should split before more guys show up.’

‘What?’

‘I think maybe this isn’t the best time . . .’ He is grasping for words, stuck between a blood-sworn loyalty and what he owes
that grandfather from the park who bought his soul for fifteen grand. He considers the Couch Mother, the superintendent, Annabel,
Kat, himself. Obligation makes for tough sledding.

Shep says, ‘The guy came at me. I was defending myself.’

Shep is a lot of things, but he is not a liar.

Mike thinks about his mother’s faint cinnamon smell, his meandering graveyard walks, and Kat asleep in the next room. He will
not – cannot – let anything put that child or her future at risk. And yet Shep is Shep, their friendship battle-tested like
no other relationship Mike has ever known. Life is unfair; Mike knows this firsthand. But in this moment he hates that he
is now on the high end of the seesaw, enjoying the better view.

He is sweating, unsure of himself, filled with self-loathing. He says, ‘I know that, but it’s not . . . safe. I mean, I got
a baby now. The neighbors. I’m still trying to figure this whole thing out, you know?’

Shep snaps off a nod and stands, his face betraying nothing. Feeling like a heel, Mike walks him down. His broad frame cut
from the slanting yellow of the streetlights, Shep heads toward the Wash, Mike a half step behind. A narrow footbridge extends
across the river. Black water rustles against concrete banks below. Mike is hustling to keep up, calling after him – ‘Shep.
Shep.
Shep
.’ – sure that Shep is, for the first time ever, mad at him.

But halfway across, when Shep finally hears and turns, his face shows no anger.

Bugs ping off the lights overhead. The eastern horizon has moved from black to charcoal. They are centered above a river moving
invisibly beneath them.

Mike clears his throat. ‘You told me once . . . you said, “You can be whatever you want to be.”’ He wants to cry – he almost
is – and he doesn’t understand himself. It is as though his face is having its own reaction to this while his heart stays
resolute and hunkered down. ‘Well’ – he casts his arms wide – ‘this is who I want to be.’

Shep’s mouth moves a bit, forming something like a sad smile. Blood shines darkly in those claw marks beneath his eye. He
says, ‘Then it’s who I want you to be, too.’

They both seem to sense the finality in those words, in this moment. The wind comes up, cutting through Mike’s jacket.
Shep offers his hand, and they clasp, gripping around the thumbs.

‘You’re my only family,’ Shep says.

He walks off before Mike can reply.

Mike watches Shep’s shoulders fading into the early-morning dark. He bites his lip, turns back into the wet wind, and starts
for home.

Mike stood before the closet, finally stripping off that button-up shirt. One-thirty
A.M.,
and he’d only just finished installing a second heavy-duty lock on Kat’s window. Despite his prompting, Kat didn’t want to
sleep in their bedroom, and he could tell by the set of Annabel’s mouth that she found his request a bit over the top as well.
He wasn’t so sure about an evidence-free home break-in anymore himself. But still, additional lock aside, he got a prickling
beneath his skin when he contemplated the view of the dark backyard through Kat’s window. He could have pressed the point
and made Kat move, but he didn’t want to give in to his fear that way. Or force them to give in to it.

He folded his dress pants, worked at the beer stain with a thumbnail, then gave up. Neatly folded clothes stared back from
the crammed shelves. All those shirts. Such a long way from the communal dresser of his childhood. He regarded the closet
with something like survivor’s guilt.

Annabel sat on the bed behind him, kicked off her high heels with a groan, and rubbed her feet. ‘I’m just saying,’ she remarked,
picking up the thread of the discussion they’d interrupted a half hour ago, ‘They had an agenda, those detectives. When she
was on the phone back there – Elzey – I didn’t like her expression. How animated she was. And the way they came back out swinging
at you.’

Down to his boxers, he turned. ‘Something was off with those cops. No question. They’re not gonna help us. We need to figure
out how to protect ourselves.’ He paused, wet his lips. ‘Maybe I should call him.’

‘Him?
Him
him?’ She leaned back on her elbows, shook her head vehemently. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Uh-uh. He scares me.’

‘He would know what to do.’

‘Or how to escalate things. Besides, you haven’t talked to Shepherd in years.’

Except for the Couch Mother, Annabel was the only one who ever referred to Shep by his full name. Mike used to think it stemmed
from her discomfort with Mike’s past, not wanting to use the abbreviated name from the stories. But he’d figured out it was
more of a maternal nod to the given name, to the boy – a mother’s sympathy for that thin-necked kid who didn’t jump when someone
dropped a lunch tray six inches from his nose.

‘And the way you left things,’ she continued. ‘What makes you think he’d be there?’

‘Shep would be there,’ Mike said firmly.

‘We have
other
friends. Terrance next door. Barry and Kay—’

‘What’s Barry gonna do, portfolio-manage them into submission? This isn’t the
kind of problem you call people like our friends for.’

‘Then why don’t you talk to that private investigator, Hank? I mean, isn’t that what a PI’s supposed to do? Find out information
on people? Look – just think about it. I don’t think we want to release the bull into the china shop. Yet.’

‘Hank’s sick. I told you.’

‘Hank never struck me as big on pity. You don’t think it might help him to have something to do?’
She pulled free a hairpin, shook out her mane. ‘I’ll go in to school tomorrow with Kat and update the contact and pickup lists,
make sure they keep a close eye on her, all that.’

‘And talk to her—’

‘Of course. We’ve had the stranger-danger talk a million times, but I’ll go over it again. Now, come here. Unzip me.’

She held up her hair, exposing the light down of her nape. He drew the zipper south, admiring the slash of flesh, and she
shrugged out of the dress and draped it over the upholstered chair in the corner. They took the duvet off together as they
had every night for years – fold, step, fold, step – a marital square dance. And then she went into the bathroom and emerged
with her toothbrush poking out of her mouth and his sporting a bead of paste. Leaning over to tug off his socks, he paused,
and she popped his toothbrush into his mouth before returning to the bathroom, wearing a clown mouth of foam. The everyday
physics of intimacy.

Brushing his teeth, he walked down the hall to Kat’s room. She was out cold, the curtain drawn, the locks secure.

He finished up in the bathroom, slid into bed next to Annabel, turned up the monitor, and exhaled. She had leaned his award
plaque against the wall by the closet, no doubt unsure what to do with the thing. His name, etched in the bluish mirror beneath
the seal of California. When he turned back, Annabel was studying him.

He said, ‘What an asshole I was standing up there accepting that award.’

‘And what an asshole
I
was sitting there playing the dutiful wife, clapping along.’ She rolled over, her face soft, and rested a hand on his cheek.
‘It’s less lonely being assholes together.’

He caught her wrist, lifted her arm gently so he could see the broken capillaries from when he’d grabbed her in the parking
lot. ‘Did I do that?’

‘Brute.’ She twisted lazily in his grasp so the back of her wrist grazed his lips. ‘All protective like that, leaving your
handprints on me. It was
such
a turnoff.’ Beneath the covers her foot found his calf.

Her touch brought a jolt of gratitude – even after stumbling through the past few days, he still got to spend the night in
this bed with this woman.

He kissed the inner curve of her arm, delicately, where it was red. Her mouth found his, and they pushed up a little, propped
on elbows, their lips joined. He shifted on top of her, stomach to stomach, both of them moving slowly, their exhaustion lending
every touch and movement a dreamlike aspect. He moved into her, but she clenched with her arms and legs, held him still. Crossing
her wrists behind his neck, her head hoisted a few inches off the mattress, she fixed her gaze on him and tilted her hips
slowly, slowly, and he slid deeper until he stopped. She held him still again, perfectly still. He was up on his knees and
hands, bearing his weight and most of hers, his arms trembling slightly.

‘I want you to look at me,’ she said. ‘All the way through.’

And he did.

After, she lay as she always did, on her back, one arm thrown across her sweaty bangs, her stomach pale in the alarm clock’s
glow. He loved the faint ridge of scar tissue from her C-section, how it traced the pan of her hips, dividing erotic from
merely sexy, a warrior’s mark of a body well used.

She held up her hand, the dull diamond of her engagement ring managing a sparkle. The new one had disappeared into the jewelry
box as soon as they’d gotten home. ‘We’ve been married a decade, Wingate.’ Her teeth pinched a bite of swollen lip. ‘It doesn’t
feel like ten years in any of the bad ways. But it feels like it in all the good ways.’

She curled into him, slinging a leg across his stomach, and he stroked her back, her skin still fever-hot. He pressed his
lips to her damp forehead and held her until she was asleep.

Lying on his back, cooling beneath the overhead fan, he couldn’t linger in the aftermath. His mind kept returning to the confrontation
at the Braemar Country Club, his shame at losing control that way, how his temper had ignited, how it had been right there
like an old friend, like something atavistic. And the cold-sweat horror of Dodge’s mouth shaping a single word:
Soon
.

He got up, padded down the hall, and carried Kat, limp and dead-heavy in his arms, back to their bed. He tucked her in in
his place and paused, surveying mother and daughter in idyllic calm. Something glinted over by the closet. His award.

He crossed and turned the plaque around so it faced the wall.

Then he killed the baby monitor, walked down to Kat’s room,
and took up his post on the glider in the corner.

Soon
, Dodge had promised.

Soon
.