“A little of both, honestly. My life works well how it is now. I have things the way I need them. How I like them. We don’t even know for sure if foul play was involved in these deaths.” All of that was the truth. But I had my doubts that everything that had happened could be a coincidence.
“I hate the idea of you being in that apartment all alone.”
“I’m not alone. I have Gizmo.”
Boden glanced towards our dogs, who were cuddled up together on the dog bed. “Ferocious.”
My lips twitched. “He’s a good first-warning system. He has a very loud bark.”
“I guess that’s better than nothing.”
“I’ve talked to Hayes. He has patrols coming by on a regular basis.”
Boden took a sip of his soda. “But he hasn’t made any new discoveries.”
I shook my head. “I talked to him right before I drove out here. No additional test results yet. Hopefully, on Monday.” I picked at the corner of my bread. “It’s Lisbeth’s memorial tomorrow. He said he’ll have plainclothes officers there, observing. Taking photos.”
“Are you going?”
I nodded. “I need to.”
Boden’s eyes roamed my face. “But you don’t want to.”
“I don’t do well with funerals. It brings back a lot of hard memories of a dark time. I hate the idea of caskets.”
A shadow passed over his features. “It’s the sea of black and the crowd that gets to me. Makes it feel like you’re suffocating, even if you’re standing out in the sunshine. Carissa’s had so many people. Had to be hundreds. People who didn’t even know her. All just wanting a look.”
“I’m sorry. That must have been incredibly hard.”
Boden lifted his gaze to me. “It couldn’t have been a walk in the park for you, either.”
“It wasn’t. They waited until I was out of the hospital, but I was still in so much pain. There was so much grief in that church, it clogged the air.”
“It becomes thick with all the emotion. Maybe that’s what makes it hard to breathe.”
“Maybe. I wished we could’ve honored the boy he was instead of focusing so much on the brutality of his loss. Jase gave so much to the people in his life. I wanted to hear more of that.”
Boden twisted noodles around his fork. “Can you find that now?”
“I’m trying to find more of it. I think everyone who loved him needs it. I was talking to his mom, Kay, about that today. She needs to keep him alive. And talking about him helps.”
Boden studied the plate in front of him. “I don’t talk about Carissa. Not really.”
“You can talk about her to me if you want. I’d love to know her through you.” I’d lost the flare of jealousy somewhere along the way. Began to realize that Boden viewed Carissa the same way I did Jase. We’d loved them, but it was more of an immature kind of love. Maybe that would’ve grown and changed. Maybe it wouldn’t have. But it had never gotten the chance.
“She had a real soft spot for animals of all kinds. She was involved in so many rescues, I lost count. Was always fostering a cat or dog. One year, she signed us up to foster kittens whose mother had died. Those kittens had to be bottle-fed every two hours. By the time they were old enough to be adopted, we were so sleep-deprived, I didn’t trust myself to drive my damn truck.”
A smile curved my lips. “It sounds like she had a good heart.”
“The best.” Something I couldn’t identify passed over his face. “It got twisted somewhere along the way. That sensitive spirit meant she felt it all. Every bit of pain around her.”
I reached out, slipping my hand into Boden’s. “You can’t protect someone from all the pain in the world. At some point, they have to learn to deal with it.”
He stared at our joined hands, not letting go. “Sometimes, people deal with it in the worst ways.”
“And that’s their decision. Not yours.”
“Sometimes, outside forces push someone in the wrong direction, though.”