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  Sophie swallowed. “You don’t think—”

  “I don’t know,” Davy said. “I wish the cop would just take her over. She needs a strong hand, and you’ve babysat her long enough.”

  “Hurry back,” Sophie said.

  Phin’s next two days were lousy with problems and frustration, alleviated only by the time he spent with Sophie. Phin watched Wes move up to two packs a day and thought, We have to finish this before he gets lung cancer. It didn’t help that his dad’s .22 was gone from the locked gun cabinet. “Anybody could have taken it,” he told Wes. “The key’s on the top, up where Dillie can’t reach it, but we weren’t trying to keep anybody else out. I haven’t looked in there for over ten years. It could have been gone that long.”

  “Great,” Wes said, and turned down a pool game to obsess over his lack of evidence again.

  The premiere took over the townspeople’s attention, possibly because Zane had been such an outsider, probably because the video was more interesting because it was about them. Stephen suggested the schools assign it as homework. “I have to write a report,” Dillie said on Friday, “so I have to watch TV. Jamie Barclay said I could watch at her house and then we could do our reports together—isn’t that a good idea?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Phin said, and thought, I hope to hell they’ve got a G-rated version of that video.

  “I’m going out to the farm,” he told Liz, who looked at him with frozen contempt. He went out to the car, grateful that it had finally stopped raining, and then caught sight of the water tower on the Hill above him.

  It was peeling.

  “What the hell happened?” he said, when he’d tracked down the Coreys.

  “It’s that stupid cheap paint,” the older one said. “When that hard rain hit, it just peeled right off.”

  “It’s cool,” the younger one said. “Looks like blood dripping off. The newspapers were here taking pictures.”

  Phin looked back up the Hill where the tower did indeed look like a huge bleeding phallic symbol. “Can you get that red off and paint it white?”

  “Oh, yeah, like we’re gonna strip the water tower,” the older Corey said. “Just give it a couple of days and it’ll be off anyway. The tower’s gonna be a weird color, though. That red doesn’t stick, but it stains.”

  That would explain why the tower looked rosier this time, even more like flesh than before. Wonderful.

  He let the Coreys go and drove out to the farm for sanity and comfort, and by the time he’d slammed the car door, Sophie was on the porch. He went toward her, feeling better just looking at her, but she shook her head and whispered, “This isn’t a good time.”

  “Now what?” His irritation married his frustration and made him snarl. “Amy build a bomb? Davy decide he hates me again? Or are you just playing hard-to-get because you want to go out to dinner? Come on, Sophie, I’ve had a lousy day. Fuck me.”

  Sophie winced, and he frowned at her, wondering when she’d turned into a prude. The screen door slammed as he said, “What’s wr—” and then a fist slammed into his eye and he was on his back in the dirt, his head throbbing.

  “Brandon.” Sophie said, and Phin looked up through the pain at a guy the size of a tank.

  “You son of a bitch,” the therapist said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Sophie moved in front of the guy, blocking Phin’s view which was pretty hazy anyway. “All right, stop it, Brandon. He didn’t mean it the way it sounded—”

  “Nobody talks to you like that,” Brandon said, and Phin sat up and tried to figure out how he’d ended up the bad guy.

  “It’s his idea of foreplay,” Sophie said uncertainly, and Phin felt like hell.

  “It’s his idea of diminishing you so that you know you’re not important to him,” Brandon said. “He’s abusive, and you’re enabling him.”

  Wait a minute. Phin tried to stand up but the world swooped around him, so he sat back down in the dirt again.

  “He’s not abusive,” Sophie said. “He’s in a bad mood. He can be perfectly lovely when he wants to be.”

  “Ouch,” Phin said.

  “And what do you have to do to make him lovely?” Brandon said. “Sophie, I know he’s been exciting, but if this is the way he treats you—”

  “He treats me just fine,” Sophie said, and Brandon looked down at Phin in the dust and said, “He treats you like a whore.”

  “Brandon!” Sophie said, and Phin leveraged his way up, grabbing the porch rail to keep what little sense of balance he had.

  “I will never understand why women stay with abusive men,” Brandon was saying. “Especially somebody like you. You’re a sensible woman, Sophie. Surely—”

  “Oh, not really,” Sophie said, watching Phin warily. “Brandon, I think you’d better go.”

  “Sophie, you can’t—”

  “Yes, I can,” she said to Brandon. Then she looked at Phin, frowning. “Don’t move until I get back.” She prodded Brandon over to his car, and he went, still explaining her abusive relationship to her. Phin squinted at the car. A late-model Toyota. Practical of him. Then Sophie stretched up to kiss the giant therapist good-bye, and Phin scowled, which hurt, and leaned against the porch post, which also hurt, until the enemy was gone.

  “Let’s get some ice on that eye,” Sophie said, as she came back to him and took his arm.

  “I don’t like him,” Phin said, still dizzy.

  “I know, bear,” she said. “He doesn’t like you, either.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Phin was stretched out on the dock by the rushing river with his head in Sophie’s lap, ice on his eye, and Lassie sniffing his ear.

  “This is all my fault.” She leaned down and moved the ice to kiss his bruised eye, and he felt some of his tension seep away. “I never should have told Brandon about you.”

  “Yes, you should have.” Phin watched her face hover above him, concern wrinkling her forehead. She’s mine, he wanted to tell Brandon, preferably on the phone. “You might have told me he was built like a truck.”

  Sophie put the ice back on his eye. “He played second-string football for Ohio State. He says he would have been first-string but he kept going to class.”

  “Don’t tell him I played golf for Michigan. Although, if I’d had my four iron, this would have ended very differently.”

  Sophie’s laugh bubbled out and he smiled at her because he loved her face when she laughed. “Why the hell did he hit me anyway? I thought you’d told him it was over.”

  Sophie’s smile faded. “It was that crack you made about dinner and the ... language you used.”

  Phin frowned and then winced as his face protested. “He doesn’t want me to take you to dinner?” he said, as he moved the ice away from his eye. “Too damn bad, but that’s not a reason to punch somebody. And you never minded my language before.”

  “He doesn’t want you making me feel cheap,” Sophie said. “I have a history of that.”

  He scowled up at her and said, “What?” and then he listened with increasing guilt as she told him about the louse she’d lost her virginity to.

  When she’d finished, he said, “This is the town-boy thing.”

  She nodded.

  “Fuck. I’d have hit me, too. Maybe I can still catch him, and we can go to Iowa together. Beating up a middle-aged businessman would make us both feel better.”

  “Thank you, but no,” Sophie said. “Davy took care of Chad a long time ago.”

  “Good for Davy,” Phin said. “I’m sorry, Sophie.”

  “You didn’t mean anything when you said it,” Sophie said, smiling at him.

  An “enabler,” Brandon had said. “Call me on it when I’m being a son of a bitch,” he told her. “Don’t take that crap from me just because I’m tired and I can be nice when I want to be.”

  “Call yourself on it,” Sophie said, a little waspishly, and he said, “Fuck,” and moved the ice pack up to cover his eye.

  “I’m sorry about Chad,” he t