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Bailey shrugged. “We all have our security blankets.”

“What’s yours?” he asked as the waitress arrived with their beers. “Thanks.”

Bailey took a long drink. The easy answer would be making a podcast. She clawed her way through unsolved mysteries, shining a light on cases everyone forgot but the people who mourned. But he already knew that, and it didn’t make her feel safe. Just useful. “Moving.”

“Moving? How?”

“I don’t know. No matter where I live, it doesn’t feel right. But I don’t have to admit that to myself if I just moved. Or if my house is a rental. A lack of roots makes me feel like I can’t be hurt—even if logically, I know that’s nonsense.” She sighed. “But I have to settle down in one place. It didn’t matter when Matt was a baby. We’ve stayed in the same area for preschool, but now that kindergarten is right around the corner, I need to pick a place and stay put. I want him to have that stability.”

“Where will you move to?”

“I don’t know. I can live anywhere. Ryan and I moved here because he wanted to return to Virginia after law school, and I stayed in the state because it was easier.”

“Because of Angus and Kimbra?”

“I guess. I’m not sure. I want Matt to have a family. But his grandparents are…” She waffled her hand. “You know what I mean. What’s your security blanket?”

“Good question.” He took a pull from his beer and leaned back with the long neck in his hand. “What if I said I didn’t have one?”

“I’d say bullshit, and that wasn’t fair, because I just told you a secret.”

“Moving isn’t a secret.”

“The reasons why are—or at least it’s a vulnerability.”

“Fair enough. All right. Mine is…research.”

Bailey snorted. “That’s definitely not a security blanket.”

His grin hitched, but something in his eyes had softened. “Okay, not a security blanket. A vulnerability.”

He was offering tit for tat. She liked the way he noticed and acted on little things. “How so?”

“I continued working on cold cases even after the feds gave me the boot. Research here and there. Following up on dead ends or evidence where there wasn’t enough manpower or money to facilitate more manhours.”

“Really? That’s cool.”

He tipped his head to the side, shrugged, and set his beer on the table. “When I was a kid, something bad happened, and it was the help of a stranger with time on her hands that helped untangle the mess.”

The haziness in his expression warned her to respect his intentional vagueness. But the sad way his lips pulled down made her ask, “What happened?”

He rolled the beer bottle between his palms. “My sister was murdered.”

The restaurant carried on around them. Laughter, dishes clattering, someone calling for another beer. Bailey knew how that felt, too. Saying the worst thing that had ever happened to her while everyone else kept having an ordinary day. All this time, he’d known what it was like to say the words that were still hard for her: my sister was murdered. She watched his hands turn the bottle, giving him time to do whatever he needed.

He studied the table for a long moment before lifting his eyes to her. “It’s not something I talk about.”

Very few people understood the pain that came with losing a sibling. “You don’t have to tell me anything else. Really. I understand.”

“The investigation went nowhere for a couple of years,” he started quietly. “This woman, a retired high school lit teacher who liked to follow up on cold cases of kids who would have been her students’ ages, nosed her way into the case and found out what the cops had missed.”

What had been missing was always the answer, and the question was already on the tip of her tongue, but she waited until he looked at her again, then read his expression to make sure it was okay to ask, “What’d they miss?”

“A football jersey.”

Bailey’s eyes widened. “I’m going to keep asking questions unless you don’t want me to. Or you should tell me everything you’re comfortable saying, and I’ll try to keep my mouth shut.”

His small smile cleared the haze in his eyes. “I like that about you, you know that? You’re upfront and direct.”