Deklan

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Deklan says. “Maybe it was the guy he mugged before me. Maybe the coroner dropped him.”

“Dek…”

“You know what?” Deklan sits up slightly, gritting his teeth. “How about you just take all this up with my attorney? I have nothing else to say to you two.”

“If this goes to trial,” Longbow says, “it will look better if you cooperate with us now.”

“You fuckers know this isn’t going to go to trial,” Deklan says, “so stop wasting my time.”

Deklan refuses to say anything else, and the two officers finally give up and leave, promising to be back in the morning.

“You should go home,” Deklan tells me again. “I’m fine, and they’re just going to tell me to rest.”

“Well, I’ll have to stay to make sure that you do.” I raise an eyebrow at Deklan when he glares at me. “I’m not going anywhere. Get used to it.”

“Stubborn.”

“When I need to be.”

“Where’s Brian?”

“In the waiting room, as far as I know. Do you want me to get him?”

“Just tell him to keep an eye on shit,” Deklan says. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

I deliver Deklan’s message to Brian, and Deklan is moved to a private room with a reclining chair so I have somewhere to sleep. Once he’s settled in, he asks me to retrieve his phone from his bag of personal effects. I’m surprised to find an actual smartphone inside.

Deklan takes it from me and starts tapping the screen.

“Who are you texting?” I ask.

“Sean.”

“I didn’t know you had a smartphone.”

“I don’t use it very much.”

He only takes a moment to complete his message. I find it strange that I’ve never seen this phone before and wonder if he’s been intentionally hiding it from me. It’s entirely possible. It makes me wonder what else he’s hiding—probably quite a bit.

It bothers me. A lot. It reminds me that I know very little about the man I married.

“Can I look through your phone?” I blurt out.

“Why?”

“I want to know what kind of music you like.”

“There isn’t any music on my phone.”

“Why not?”

“I just use it for work.”

I narrow my eyes at him. Deklan sighs and holds out his hand, palm up, with the phone lying in the middle of it.

“Go ahead. Look through all of it. I don’t text, and there aren’t any women’s phone numbers in there except Teagan’s.”

I narrow my eyes at him slightly as I take the phone from his hand. It’s not locked, and he was telling the truth about the lack of texts. Aside from the message he sent to Sean, which just says “all good,” there are only four of them in the phone’s history. All were sent to him. The messages are brief and cryptic, and he only replied to the one from Teagan. The others don’t even have a contact associated with them. The only music on the device is some classical piece that probably came with the music app.