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loyal protector hung back about twenty paces behind me. It made me feel a little bit like a celebrity with my own personal bodyguard, and I wondered if I kept going around if he would continue to walk in circles with me. I imagined he would and that it might be fun to test it out, but I decided not to push it.
    When Lord Berkeley had his exercise for the morning, I reentered the house and made some breakfast and then leaned my body halfway out the front door and invited Taye inside. He frowned at me like I was out of my mind and shook his head. I returned to the kitchen, grabbed the two plates I’d made up, walked outside and plopped down in the adjoining chair across from him.
    “Well,” I said, “if you won’t come in, I guess I’ll come out.”
    He looked off to the side at nothing and let out a long exaggerated sigh and then faced me.
    “I have a job to do. And all this,” he said and pointed to the food, “it’s a distraction.”
    “It’s eggs and toast,” I said. “You have to eat, right?”
    I held the plate out to him and wiggled it a few inches from his nostrils in an attempt to rouse his appetite, and for the first time since we’d met, he cracked a smile. It was slight and barely noticeable to the untrained eye, but there nonetheless. It may not have been a mouthful of bright whites, but it was a start.
    “I’ll eat this lady, but then you have to go back inside, okay?”
    “I can live with that,” I said.
    We sat across from one another and ate our food in silence. I was leery about whether I should engage him in a verbal exchange he didn’t want to have so I tried my best to act like it felt natural to sit there and remain mute. After a few minutes in complete silence, I started to crack. Taye managed to shovel gargantuan-sized spoonful’s of eggs into his mouth without the slightest glance toward his plate which fascinated me enough to endure the silence. While he chewed his eyes darted around to the street, the side yard, the bushes and then back to the street again.
    A car turned up the road and steered its way in the direction of my humble abode. Taye didn’t miss a beat. He shoved his plate into my lap and stuck his hand under the side of his shirt and placed it on his waist and rested it there. The few inches of skin he exposed revealed a six pack, the likes of which I’d only seen in the movies, and I couldn’t peel my eyes away from it.
    “You should go back inside,” he said. “Now.”
    I arched my body over the side of my chair and stared out into the street.
    “It’s just Nick,” I said.
    He squinted and rose from his chair to get a better look.
    “Detective Calhoun?”
    I nodded.
    “Wonder what he’s doing here,” he said.
    “He, uh, lives here,” I said.
    Taye Diggs twisted his face into a shape that reminded me of one of those apples that people let sit forever and then when they were good and rotten, they made faces out of them and sold them to the public under the false pretense that they resembled a famous celebrity.
    “You and him, you’re together?” he said.
    I nodded.
    “Huh,” he said.
    I got the impression he didn’t hold Nick in the highest regard, and I wondered why, but before I could say anything more, Nick had parked and got out of the car and walked up the drive. The two men glanced at one another and Nick made it a point to glare at the two plates in my hand, but neither smiled and no pleasantries were exchanged. Nick blew past him like he was a gnat he wanted get rid of and opened the front door and waltzed into the house like he needed to prove his status in the pecking order. I turned to follow him inside.
    “Hey,” Taye said when I started through the door, “thanks for the food.”
    I smiled and nodded.
    When I shut the door behind me, Nick had settled in on a stool at my bar.
    “I came to take you to lunch,” he said, “but I can see you’ve already eaten.”
    “I got a late start today. If you would have called I wouldn’t