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two drinks in front of him, one almost finished, the other untouched. I squeezed my way through the crowd, sat down and brought the beer toward me. “Cheers,” I said, and he just nodded, his eyes fixed on someone over my shoulder. I turned and followed his gaze. He was watching a guy from the village—a trawler fisherman called Prouse—talking to a small group of men.
    â€œWhere were you?” he asked. His eyes didn’t leave the man.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œI called you earlier and told you to come down to the village hall.”
    â€œI was in the middle of something.”
    His eyes flicked back to me. “Really?”
    â€œIf that cop needs to talk to me, you told him where I live.”
    â€œYou
were
listening to what I said, right?”
    â€œYou’re not a cop anymore, Healy.”
    He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    â€œIt means you don’t owe them anything. It’s not your job to round up the suspects and throw them into the back of the van. Not for this Rocastle guy, not for anyone.”
    â€œI know that.”
    â€œDo you?”
    He eyed me but didn’t respond. He’d become more controlled in the months since I’d known him, but it was still hard for him to bite his tongue. He was used to hitting out, used to lying and misleading when he needed to, and this new life—miles away from the city, miles from his ex-wife and two boys—was new and probably, in its own way, quite daunting. This wasn’t his playground. He wasn’t operating from a position of strength. He’d needed to get out of London because it was suffocating him; he’d been fired, he was still mourning the loss of his daughter, and he was on the verge of doing something rash in the days before I was attacked. After I was finally released from hospital, I needed to get away too, and I owed Healy my life, at least in part. So I offered him a room in the cottage my parents had left behind for me. I never put a time frame on it—I guess because I saw us driving each other insane inside a couple of weeks—but somehow we were four months down the line and he was still here.
    â€œYour woman called for you again,” he said, fiddling with the lid on his cigarette packet as wind pressed again at the walls of the pub. “You ever gonna call her back?”
    â€œYou seem to be handling it pretty well.”
    He smirked. “That’s cold.”
    â€œIt’s not cold.”
    â€œWhat, you saying this is you all warm and fuzzy?”
    â€œWhy are you even taking her calls?”
    â€œBecause you’re not.”
    I looked at him.
    â€œShe started calling me when you stopped answering your phone.” He studied me, got no answer, and finished his pint. “She’s desperate. What am I supposed to do?”
    â€œStop taking her calls.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with speaking to her?”
    â€œThis is
my
life.”
    â€œI doubt she’ll call again, anyway,” he said after a while, shrugging. He pushed the pint glass away from him. “I told her you were gone and you weren’t coming back.”
    â€œWhy did you tell her that?”
    â€œWell, that’s pretty much what’s happened, isn’t it?”
    Again, I remained silent. I’d never talked to him about the reasons Liz and I had separated, and the reasons I could never go back to her, but sometimes it felt like he’d guessed. In the days before I got stabbed, I’d started to realize she didn’t understand why I did what I did, the debt I had to the missing, and I realized I couldn’t face a future where all I did was fight with her about it. Healy got that part—because he was driven by the same kind of ghosts as me—but while sometimes I felt the two of us were getting somewhere, able to understand each other, at other times he’d say something to me or look at me in a certain way, and