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that knows I like men. If someone in the family had to die there, it would have been better if it were me and not Hyun-Shik.”
     

Chapter 3
     

     

     
    I’d never been smooth with men. This wasn’t any exception. I struggled with the possibilities of what to say. Eventually, my brain kicked out something brilliant.
     
    “Wow. Um, okay.” Not my best, but after the closed-mouth atmosphere in the household, I was struck speechless.
     
    “Are you going to put that in your report?” Jae stopped fiddling with the soup and turned to face me. There was more than suspicion there. With his chin tilted up, there was a definite challenge in his stance. I might have outweighed him by forty pounds, but he wasn’t going to go down without some kind of fight.
     
    I was left to wonder: who was he fighting?
     
    “No,” I replied. “How long has your aunt known?”
     
    The tautness was back around his eyes. Steam rose from the soup pot, a light, fragrant mist that made my stomach rumble. It’d been a long time since I’d had that piece of Claudia’s pie, and my body was letting me know it. While the soup smelled good, I wasn’t certain I wanted to eat anything in that house. The Kim family seemed like the type that regularly poisoned one another just for kicks.
     
    “I don’t know,” Jae said, frowning slightly. “She blames me for what happened to Hyun-Shik.”
     
    “Why?” I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae’s long fingers closed over my wrist. “What? You can’t eat this raw?”
     
    “It’s bitter melon. You won’t like it.” He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. “Here, leftover bao. There’s char siu inside.”
     
    “The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese.”
     
    “It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti.”
     
    “Cute. I was joking.” I smiled as I bit into the cold, white-bread dumpling. Cold food and I have always had a loving relationship. “So, before you distracted me with food, why does your aunt blame you for Hyun-Shik’s death?”
     
    “She thinks I’ve been a bad influence on him.” More guilt surfaced as he struggled again with the changing of tense. “Hyun-Shik made up his own mind on what he wanted to do or not do. He didn’t need me to influence him to do anything.”
     
    I let that sink in. My picture of Hyun-Shik wasn’t a clear one, far from it. On one hand, he’d taken a handful of pills and died in a gay escort club, hardly the picture of self-esteem. Jae-Min saw him differently, and it was at odds with the personality I’d formed in my head. Sure, people often didn’t show their true selves to people around them, but the Kims were an opaque mess. I didn’t know which Hyun-Shik to buy as the real one.
     
    But I did know what I could ask Jae to help me with. Then again, I was going to have to trust he’d tell me the truth on that too. He was hard to read, other than flashes of anger under the surface. Pulling out the copy of the suicide note, I placed it on the counter for Jae to look at.
     
    “Have you seen this yet?” I wanted to see Jae’s gut reaction to his cousin’s note. Surprise is usually an investigator’s best weapon when asking questions. “Can you tell me what this says?”
     
    His fingers trembled when he touched the paper. A softness warmed his mouth, giving me wicked thoughts I didn’t need at the moment. “No, I haven’t seen it. Is this…?”
     
    Jae left the question unfinished. Another secret lurked around us. Now I was certain there was something more than a light acquaintance between the two. He was troubled, stricken at the sight of his cousin’s handwriting on a copied piece of paper.
     
    “Can you tell me what this says?” I asked again, hoping to jar him from his distress. “I have a translation in the file, but I don’t know Korean and I wanted someone who knew Hyun-Shik to tell me what they