.

Meguire filed two separate federal court cases up Richard's ass over what he apparently felt were inadequate kitchen supplies. He sent Rachel out shopping mid-afternoon with additional funds to stock them up, paying for a trip to the pharmacy to replace the thermometer Richard had ruined by dropping into the toilet. He pent a good chunk of the rest of the day on Richard's business line, at one point traveling down to the office to mop up Richard's notes from his desk. "I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I think you're doing too much," Meguire said, reemerging into Richard's room with three dog-eared folders and fresh coffee. "You got three different tails going this weekend and about as many background checks due Monday."

"Got bills this week." It no longer made him throw up to talk but it did take about three hundred percent of his gas tank to move a sentence forward.

"Starting to think some of this is burnout. Eva know you're working this hard to make rent?"

"She'll just say it's for call girls."

Meguire paused nonjudgmentally, pen cap in his teeth. "Is it?"

Richard flapped a hand towards the empty apartment to indicate the dearth of sexiness and also reasons to live. "Well either way, you're gonna be hard-pressed to deliver on these," Meguire said, popping the cap onto the end of the pen before setting about dating the notes in their margins. "Should probably call to reschedule."

He just needed sleep. He'd been spared the worst of his post-meditation headache due to Rachel and Meguire continuously pouring water down his gorge, but plenty of other aches were squaring off for his attention. He knew his stomach couldn't handle solids and booze was off the table as long as Meguire was policing him, so sleep was probably the only other thing he could do that wouldn't earn him a citation.

He didn't recall the rest of the afternoon or what a good chunk of early evening looked like either. The next time he woke it was to the side of his mattress dipping. The hands that found his face smelled like laundry soap. "My daughter's home today," he mumbled, yawning. "Leave me the number of your agency and sneak out the back so she doesn't see you."

"Har har." Rachel sounded exhausted but tolerant. She tested his forehead, rested her knuckles against his cheek. "Inspector Meguire is making dinner. Do you think you can handle soup?"

He caught her wrist and peeled his face away from his pillow enough to fix her with a crusty eyeball. Rachel was wan and pale, swallowed in the oversized sweatshirt she usually reserved for Richard's most tightassed crusades against central heating in the winter. Her hair was plaited down her back, every cowlick mashed into compliance under what'd probably been her winter hat. Seeing his gaze on her, Rachel attempted a reassuring smile for him. "Have Meguire call you in tomorrow," Richard grunted, letting her go and burying himself back into his grave. "Eva'd kill me for sending you to school like this."

There was a long pause. "Thanks, Dad," Rachel whispered.

There were probably some things that needed to be addressed. Richard straight-up didn't have the gas to address them. He felt her adjust the blankets over him, tucking him in to his chin, and the role-reversal from her childhood was enough to tailspin him a little further off his runway. "I'm going to help Inspector Meguire in the kitchen," Rachel said. "He's making pasta for us too so we can have leftovers for a few days. He says he has work tomorrow, but he'll stop by afterwards to make sure everything's all right."

"I want pie."

"You can't have pie. You're sick."

"You ate it," he deduced immediately. "After all I've done for you, this is how you thank me. You've been out for sabotage since the beginning. This is elder abuse. You're fired. I'm calling the police."

"Dad, I didn't eat a whole blueberry pie."

"Then where is it."

"It's in the kitchen! God. It'll be waiting for you as soon as you can eat it without painting the walls with it."

"Show me the evidence."

Eva's daughter yanked down both lower eyelids, hooked her ring fingers in the corners of her mouth, and waggled her not-blue tongue out at him. "I'm a world-famous detective," Richard warned her, mollified but just making sure class and phylum had been established in his kingdom. "You can't hide anything from me. You can have two blueberries out of that pie. Max. Any more and I'm taking you back to the pound."

"If it makes you feel better, we really don't have to have these territorial brawls. We have a lot in our cupboards now." Rachel stood and clicked off his bedside lamp, dousing the warmth of the room into cooler shades. "I guess Inspector Meguire called his wife and she's making some bread, so we'll have that too by tomorrow. Either way we're not hurting on groceries."

Richard stayed buried a moment. He rescued his hand from the blankets and massaged between his eyes slowly with the heel of his palm. "You keep the receipt?"

"What?"

"The receipt from the store. Did you keep it?"

Rachel paused in the midst of angling the slats of the window blinds. "I don't think he wants us to pay him back."

"We're not a soup kitchen, Rachel. We don't need charity."

"Dad, you mooch off people all the time. And brag about it. To clients."

"That's different."

She looked bewildered. "Why?"

"It just is." He hoped he sounded sick and pitiful enough to convince her to let it die without a trial. "Just get the receipt, all right? Put it on my desk downstairs."

She didn't let it die. She returned to his bedside and exhumed him from his grave of linens. "Tell me why it's different."

"It just is."

"Why."

"Because I'm the adult here and I say it is."

"Dad, the 'I'm the adult here so I'm right' card stopped working when you got food poisoning eating the two week old shrimp I told you to throw out," Rachel said. "You two were partners. I mean… he's your friend, isn't he? Why can't you just let people show you they care about you? Why does that scare you so much?"

Richard strongly considered returning her to manufacturing for a full factory reset. The fact was that he wasn't nihilistic enough to presume Meguire didn't care about him. The problem was that Meguire's concern usually had strings attached. Richard strongly suspected that by the time he was ambulatory, all of his booze and most of his cigarettes would come up missing from his agency. Meguire and Eva busting him for contraband after a particularly rough binge wasn't new, but usually Richard was forewarned enough to smoke them off the trail of the good stuff. He'd left his 80 proof bourbon right out in the open by the coffee. "No comeback, huh," Rachel said.

He made goose-like retching noises against the pillow until Rachel hastily vacated her perch. "Get the receipt," he yawned, working the sheet back up over him. He was shaking again and he didn't feel like hearing her bitch about it. "You can have one slice of pie. Two if you're a good girl and bring Daddy some of his liquor from the back of the spice cabinet."

"You'll get broth and like it. Honestly, Dad, you're such a toddler."

"Hey." Rachel had nearly stalked out of the room; she half-turned now to look over her shoulder, hand on the doorframe, radiating strained patience. "Haven't seen the brat around," Richard said. "You finally drown him in the toilet or did he piss off on his own this time?"

"Conan?" She looked a little taken-aback that he'd asked. "He's still at Dr. Agasa's, I think. Why?"

"He been back since yesterday?"

"No, but he called me not too long ago to let me know he'd be late. He said not to hold up dinner for him."

Richard eyeballed her. Rachel was still a pasty portrait of too-little sleep, but she wasn't any more apprehensive than she'd been on the way in. "And you're fine with that."

"Well, I mean, I'm not thrilled, but as long as he's with Dr. Agasa, I'd say he's pretty safe, don't you? I mean, Conan's pretty responsible. I usually don't really worry as long as he remembers to give me a call."

"So you'll let a seven year-old fuck off around town but not me?"

"I don't let either of you 'fuck off'," Rachel said tartly, and Richard wondered if he should maybe feel some sort of way about the fact that her resemblance to him was strongest when she was gunslinging expletives. "He's with Dr. Agasa and he's calling me every hour. No offense, Dad, but I have to spend way less time cleaning up after his messes than yours."

"Hey. I do the dishes."

"You know that's not what I meant, and anyway you've done the dishes like, one time in the past six months."

"That's one more time than your mother's done them."

Rachel's eyes narrowed. "Mom has never dumped my food out the window."

"Because she was too busy giving you food poisoning twice a week. You wanna hit that up instead, be my guest. Door's right over there."

"I'd take Mom's food poisoning any day over coming home to find my dad unconscious on the floor, so maybe I will."

Richard felt the zing on that one rip off a little flesh. Startled by how quickly she'd gone for his throat during what he'd thought had been play, he subsided.

Rachel blanched at her own temper. She dropped her gaze down to her feet and shuffled them. "I'm sorry, Dad," she murmured. "I didn't mean that."

Richard's fingertips were tingling again. He escaped onto his back to face the ceiling, digging a thumbnail against them to chase out the chill. "I'm going to go help Inspector Meguire," Rachel said. "Try to get some more sleep, okay? I'll bring your food in for you when it's done."

He grunted.

He heard her push off the frame. A moment later his door shut gently behind her.

Beika daylight flashed middle fingers through the blinds. Richard rolled over to meet it. He worked a thumb under his jaw and massaged away the prickling sensation until the ring from Maya's wire ached under pressure.

.

His broth was delivered in Rachel's childhood ducky-patterned sippy cup along with a elderly-abusive rice cracker. He kept his carcass upright in the bedside chair while Meguire helped Rachel change the sheets on his bed. "You'll live." Meguire looked like he'd spent the night getting blendered by feral cats. He gathered up his own paperwork in his bag. "Got some grub in the fridge once you plan on eating it instead of wearing it. Midori's got the bread going – I'll bring it over tomorrow."

"You couldn't have asked her to make a strudel?" Richard was focused on trying to eject the rice cracker out the door under heavy guard. "Or a rum cake? What kind of pasta are we talking about here? You make garlic toast?"

"He means thank you, Inspector," Rachel said. "For everything. I don't know how I would've managed without you."

"I don't want you to be a hero," Meguire said, holding his card out to her. "That's my work extension at the station, but I put my landline for my house on the back in case I don't have my pager on me. He tanks again, let me know."

"Thank you."

"You mind giving us a minute?"

"Of course not." Rachel sighed as Richard peeled off a nub of the rice cracker to flick at her neck. "I'm sure Dad will behave himself and be very grateful too for everything you've done."

"Dad's right here and not taking requests," Richard said. "And still without garlic toast. And a tenant living rent free with lots of time on her hands. Draw up the dots."

"I'll take your bag and get your jacket out from the closet." Rachel ignored him, taking Meguire's things from him and heading out the door. She shut it behind her firmly.

Meguire was looking at him.

Already annoyed with the conversation, Richard avoided his scrutiny. He took a swallow out of the very masculine sippy cup and on second thought crammed the rice cracker into a crack in the baseboard.

Meguire took it out and also plucked the cup from him. He set them on the bedside table as he hauled Richard back over to the bed. Richard could've probably walked by himself but that wasn't the point Meguire was making. Manhandling was punctuation. He pulled the blankets back up as Meguire maneuvered the chair he'd vacated, and for a while silence was a standoff.

Meguire said, because he'd built a career of winning standoffs, "I didn't take your booze."

Richard took the sippy cup back to hide his surprise behind ducks. "I know when you're lying," Meguire said. "So I'm going to ask this one more time, once and for all. Off record."

"I didn't take anything."

Meguire watched him.

The broth was getting cold. Richard thought about rearranging his insides to do some exterior decorating but had a feeling it wouldn't get him out of this conversation. Just invite more witnesses to it. "You scared her," Meguire said simply.

He was too tired to prevaricate. "Don't you think I know that?"

"Didn't find any drugs. Usually if you pass out after a binge there's evidence around you to show what you took. I'd thought Rachel might've cleaned it up before I got here, but she said she didn't find any bottles. Just you on the floor."

"You searched my apartment for drugs without a warrant?"

"Yep," Meguire said, remorseless by long association. "So I guess my question is, if I leave now, and I don't contact Eva, and I don't take your booze, what will I be setting Rachel up to find tomorrow."

"I didn't take anything."

"I know you didn't."

Then what the hell. "I didn't do this on purpose."

"Don't think it makes much of a difference at this point," Meguire said. "So I'm gonna give it to you straight. You have another reaction like this – this ever happens again – I'll be the one calling in the ambulance. If that's not what you want, figure this out. You want help, I'll try and get it for you. But I'm not doing this again."

Richard pondered equity behind his barricade of ducks. That was actually a better deal than he'd expected. Strangely enough the knowledge that Meguire did believe him deflected most of the flak onto things that didn't bleed. It was one thing to have undiagnosed physiological fuckery and another thing to be blamed for it. "All right."

Meguire seemed to accept the response. He grunted as he stood, maneuvering the back of the chair against the wall. "There's still time to make garlic toast," Richard said.

"You're welcome." Meguire left the door open as he walked out. "Good night."

Richard listened to the quiet exchange of words at the front door before it closed and latched. Rachel took a while to come back to his room. He heard the kitchen faucet running, the chatter of dishes being set against each other in the rack; eventually the kitchen light flicked off. Rachel came to his door with her sweatshirt sleeves hiked up to her elbows, hands reddened to the wrists. "How are you feeling, Dad?" she asked softly. "Are you done with dinner?"

Richard turned his gaze to the ceiling and beckoned for her with his forefinger. "C'mere."

He heard her approach warily. He waited until she was close enough to grab before hauling her in by her sweatshirt, hooking her down until he could cocoon her head with his arm.

She crumpled against him instantly. "Sorry," Richard muttered into her hair.

Her response came muffled nearly a full minute later. "Okay."

He waited. That was apparently all the absolution he was going to get. "I didn't mean it," Rachel said. "Earlier. What I said."

"It's fine."

"I didn't mean it, Dad."

He wanted a cigarette. He thumbed the steam-dampened hair off her temples and thought about closed doors and empty spaces. The finality of a latch being thrown.

.

He managed to get halfway down his checklist of monthly expenses before his last neuron mutinied. He shut his bedside lamp off in time for consciousness to jump ship after it, dozing shallowly until his last evening painkiller finally pushed him over the edge for good.

He woke sometime later to someone in his orbit. The sun had set at some point as he'd slept, leaving only the faintest illumination from the streetlights outside his blinds to make out shapes in the room. The rest of the room was unusually dark. Before he could react to it, Rachel murmured, "It's me. Try to drink this."

He was too sleepy to protest. He worked himself up a little further and nabbed for the glass in the dark with claw-machine accuracy. "Slowly," she cautioned, but handed it over.

He managed to find it and brushed her hand incidentally. It felt unusually small and flinched immediately away from the contact. The water tasted filmy; Richard clucked his tongue up against the roof of his mouth in a yawn to catch the graininess of sediment. "It's a… a protein booster," Rachel said. "Meguire said it'd help facilitate recovery. He seemed really serious so I thought I'd better follow directions."

Something in him that wasn't half asleep or drugged keyed into her odd inflection and word choice, but all in all whistleblowing her lexicon wasn't high on his to-do list. Either she'd assassinate him with good intentions or she wouldn't. He shoved the glass back and flopped over onto his stomach, sleepily working an itch off his neck.

He heard feet hit the floor and trot to the kitchen. His digital clock by the windowsill read 11:49. There was something else important he was supposed to be doing but he couldn't put his finger on it.

He buried his nose into his pillow and put a bookmark in it.

The door was ajar and the nightlight was back on in the hallway. There was a silhouette in the chair that wasn't Meguire's.

Richard reached for his gun and found a slobbery pillow instead. He cocked it back and slammed it into the assassin's face, prompting a muffled squawk of alarm. "Go to bed," he mumbled, pulling it back over and flipping it to the dry side.

Conan adjusted the glint of his glasses in the gloom. He reached over to the table and flicked on the lamp, introducing well-meaning shrapnel into Richard's eyeballs. "Meguire said to make sure you got the next dose of your anti-inflammatory when you woke up," Conan said, sliding down off the chair and pushing it closer to his bedside to gain access to the table.

Richard palmed his eyes until the ache died down. Conan clambered back up and tapped his shoulder. For the second time in as many days, Richard contemplated ways to get dead without incurring Eva's mean eulogy and ultimately decided sitting up was easier for everyone. Conan held the glass out and Richard took it, crooking his fingers impatiently until Conan handed the pill over. "There's bread here if you want to coat your stomach first," Conan said.

Richard ignored him and threw it back with the ease of practice. Conan was swimming in the little blue hooded sweatshirt that Rachel had wrangled up for him from her old clothes trunk. He eyeballed Richard the entire time Richard was drinking, which wasn't anything unusual save for the fact that Richard found that for once he didn't mind. It'd taken an evening of Conan avoiding his gaze to figure out which pissed him off more. "What," Richard grunted as he set aside the glass.

"Nothing." Conan hesitated. His gaze flickered across Richard's face. "How do you feel?"

"Vertical."

"I mean your stomach. And your… the rest of you."

Tired. There were some options now that he was sitting but most of them were punishable by gravity. He considered the complaints of his bladder and wondered if Rachel would call the cops on him if he tried to aim out the window.

"Do you feel any better?"

It'd be hilarious but not as hilarious when she made him clean up the failure. Richard came to an executive decision and peeled off the covers.

Conan made a startled sound. "Where are you going?"

"Bathroom."

"Wait." Conan hastily worked himself off the chair. "Let me get Rachel to help you walk to—"

"Leave her alone," Richard yawned. Gravity picked a fight with him almost immediately when he stood, but to his surprise his feet stayed where he put them. A pass over his pulse found it even and slow.

Huh. He drained about seventeen megaliters out of his body in the bathroom and washed his hands, then on second thought brushed his teeth.

Conan was still lingering by his bedroom door. Scritching the crust from the corner of his eye, Richard finally spotted Conan's sleeping bag rolled up in the corner by the lamp, which told him Conan was either planning to bunk in Rachel's room or stakeout Richard's chair for the rest of the night like a snotty four-eyed gargoyle.

He braced a hand on the wall for balance as he snagged it, launching it across the room. Conan caught it with a woomph of escaping air that sent him skidding onto his butt. "Quit gawking and go to bed," Richard said.

Conan got his feet under him silently, bag in his arms. Richard briefly considered backtracking for pie and decided not to press his luck. For the first time in over a day, his head felt clear enough to start lining up his weekend on his mental to-do list. He'd need to crunch the prep to make up for lost time and pie would be an incentive to get up at a conscionable hour.

He set his alarm for a responsible single-digit o'clock and flopped into bed. Conan trailed in like campfire smoke. "Hit the light when you're done," Richard grunted, stifling another yawn as he arranged his pillows. He rolled over onto his side to face the window and threw his forearm over his eyes, breathing deeply. There was still a spot under his ear that buzzed a little when he pressed it, but the itching under his skin and the tension around his windpipe was gone. Whatever it was that'd decided to throttle him had apparently changed its mind.

He pried out the bottommost pillow from his pile and launched it over without looking, hearing another satisfying squawk as it hit its target. Conan apparently had very exacting standards for his sleeping arrangements; Richard heard him fuss with his sleeping bag for several minutes and at one point leave the room to retrieve something from the kitchen, but once he returned it was to climb back up on the chair to shut off the lamp.

Richard encountered several problems as he waited for his body to fuck off. Some of them were tangential and most of them were just unfortunate byproducts of having reared small children. He clocked a solid eight minutes of Conan's fake sleep-breathing and four more after Conan shifted his weight atop his sleeping bag. The wind had picked up outside enough to jostle the window on the frame, but what glints he could see of the glass through the blinds told him it wasn't raining yet.

Conan said from behind him, very quietly, "I'm sorry."

Richard didn't move. He wondered if Conan thought he was asleep or just knew Richard faked sleep even worse than a seven year-old. "If I'd known you were going to…" Conan trailed off. "If I'd known you weren't feeling well, I wouldn't have just… left like that. I needed to go, but I would've done things differently. It wasn't supposed to turn out like that."

The furnace clunked; central heating hiccupped in the walls before resuming draining money out of Richard's wallet. "I just…" Conan actually sounded helpless. "I worked so hard, and now everything's back to how it was before, where people always just… expect these big things from me all the time and get mad at me when I don't do it the way they want. So when you said I couldn't go, I thought it was just another control thing, and you were just trying to stop me from leaving because you wanted to prove a point. But then I… I thought about what happened afterwards, what you said, and I guess I just didn't realize that you might… actually be worried. And then you got sick, and…"

Richard could hang an entire diorama of planets on Conan's ellipses. He considered fucking off anyway and ended up unintentionally wide-awake to listen to Conan's frustrated, uneven breaths. "I just didn't think you'd care that much if I left," Conan said at last, defeated. "That's all."

Richard was keenly aware of Rachel sleeping down the hall. Conan continued to breathe in and out through his nose, probably already resenting his own lapse.

Who are you. In a darkness bracketed between the hallway nightlight and the city outside his blinds, Richard suddenly wasn't sure if he was qualified to figure out what was real and what wasn't. He'd thought it'd mattered and then Conan had scrambled away from Richard's approach with panic in his eyes, and it'd suddenly mattered a lot less. Plenty about Conan was scripted horseshit but some things were just science. A learned fear of velocity and immovable objects.

Richard rolled over. Conan tensed at the sound but didn't move. Richard could see him sitting cross-legged atop his sleeping bag, silhouetted by the hallway nightlight.

Richard massaged his eyes as he organized his catalogue of ammunition. He opted to shoot straight. "He hit you?"

The shadow of Conan's chin tilted up a little. "Your old man," Richard said.

"No." It was soft but immediate. "Never."

Huh. Richard thumbed between his eyes a while.

Conan said, equally unexpectedly, "Did yours?"

He calculated how much grief to give Conan for the overreach. In the end it was dark enough in the room that it could probably be handwaved as disorientation. "When I had it coming."

Conan was silent a moment. Richard was already moving on to the next round of ammunition in his head and was surprised when Conan said, "Does anyone really ever?"

"Ever what."

"Have it coming."

Thirty years age difference. A generation, Richard realized, still hiding behind his hand. Probably two at this point. Enough time that the concept of classmates getting smacked around by their fathers had become unusual enough to burn calories philosophizing over. Richard may have gotten it worse than most but he hadn't been alone. It'd given them reasons to grow taller faster. It was why Judo tournaments hadn't mattered and Judo reflexes had. Tangible, specific results. "It doesn't matter now."

"I always kind of wondered why Rachel didn't have any pictures of her grandparents on that side." Conan was distant. He sounded like he was speaking to himself. "She never talked about them, but she was so close to the ones on her mother's side."

"Yeah, I'm sure it really kept you up at night during the long, long one single month you've known her," Richard said. "Just leave it. That wasn't a season pass for you to go grave digging. The past is in the past."

"If yours is in the past, then mine is too."

Fucking was it now. Richard arrived at a few conclusions simultaneously but there were some last-minute skeletons to organize. He could pretty much justify burying a few things as long as there was more soil than bullshit.

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Conan flinched away from him reflexively, startled. Richard was busy. He hooked his hands under Conan's arms and hoisted him up, ignoring another startled squawk, foisting him out the door to plunk his ass onto the carpet. "Stay here," Richard said. "Don't go anywhere."

He shut the door and worked himself down against the other side with legs that didn't particularly want to bend that way. The clock across the room was glowing 2:03. Six hours until pie.

He leaned his head back against the wood and thumbed the nails on his left hand as he waited. Conan didn't follow directions at first because he was a colony-ditching pissant. Richard heard him get to his feet, agitatedly start to walk, stop. He returned and stood in front of the door for a long minute. Richard could see the shadows from his feet spilling in under the door.

Richard felt the wood vibrate a little when Conan eased himself back down against it. It took another minute for Conan's head to come back as well, eliciting a barely-there whisper of sound.

Richard listened to the wind against the window for a while, waiting until the furnace cycled off.

Conan said, just loud enough for Richard to pick it up, "You put me on this side so you're not between me and the exit, didn't you."

"I did it because I'm tired of smelling you talk," Richard said. "Need to ask you three questions and I need three answers. Then I'm done."

"I can't give you what you want."

"You don't know what the hell I want. Shut your mouth and listen to an adult for once in your life."

Conan maybe shut his mouth. Richard wished he was there to witness it. Astrologically speaking it'd probably be another eighty years before it happened again. "Your last name isn't Edogawa," Richard said. "There are only three Edogawas this side of the seaboard and none of the families knew who you are, so unless you hitchhiked across the country with both thumbs up your ass, you've been feeding me a line. What I don't know is what kind of trouble your real name's attached to."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I've told you a hundred times that Conan Edogawa is my real name."

"It's someone's real name," Richard said. "I don't care, shut up, it's not what I'm asking about. I want to know if you ran away because someone was hurting you."

There was a fulminating, frustrated silence. Richard watched a minute slip by on the clock, then two.

"Why would you think that," Conan said.

Because you're scared enough to bitch and squall over a teacher's visit. Richard didn't dignify the bait by attaching fish to it. Because you're so scared about sleeping alone that you'd willingly bunk up next to a snoring freight train. "Don't run around. Answer the question."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yeah you do."

"I'm just a little kid. I don't know—"

"Conan."

Conan's breath stuttered.

Richard leaned into the silence, absently continuing to massage the pads of his fingers with his thumbnail. It'd probably been the first time he'd said the kid's name without malice or agenda. It felt enough like a concession to maybe get some return on his investment.

Conan started to speak and stopped. His weight against the door shifted.

Richard had mostly expected him to run at this point. He didn't hear any noise from Rachel's room to suggest they'd woken her, but it was probably only a matter of time. It'd be child's play for Conan to latch onto her and complain he was scared of the dark, and then he'd be out of Richard's reach for at least another week while he devised future strategies of avoidance.

Conan said, very softly, "Yes."

The immensity of the admission knocked the wind out of him. Suddenly painfully alert, Richard stared into the darkness, feeling his heartbeat accelerate. He again waited for Conan to flee, but nothing shifted at the door.

He swallowed down the obstruction and spoke again. "Whoever hurt you – they going to find you if you keep walking around? Is it going to put Rachel in the crosshairs if they do?"

Again some hesitation, but not as long this time. Conan was firmer. "No. Definitely not. I made sure of it."

Richard tried inputting the fact that a seven year-old runaway had appointed himself as his daughter's entire security task force and ultimately just didn't have the processing power. "Question three. It's the important one. Listen up."

Conan was silent.

Richard took an extra minute to phrase it. Weirdly, it was the only question he wasn't entirely sure Conan would answer honestly. The others were impersonal responses that could later be dismissed as childhood histrionics. Richard was already counting the ways Conan would try it once daylight sobered him up. I didn't mean adults hurting me. I was just scared of the bullies at school. I thought it'd be fun to pretend to be on the run from scary criminals.

He must have taken too long for Conan's nerves. "What," Conan said uncertainly.

"I want to know if you actually want to stay here."

Again Conan's breath stuttered. "Because if you don't want to be a nose-picking food-pinching freeloader here for the next eleven years, there are options," Richard said. "And I'm telling you right now, if your parents show up tomorrow and they look like they know which ass-end is up, I'm not brawling for you. I'm already risking kidnapping charges keeping you here. But if you want to stay, you tell me right now so Rachel isn't snotting all over me for the next six months trying to figure out whether or not to be sad about it."

Conan took so long to answer that Richard thought he might've missed an escape. He shifted his weight to check if Conan's shadow was still under the door. The clock changed to 2:11, then 2:12; at 2:13 the wind began directing a steady percussion of rain against the window.

He said, "You want to stay, brat?"

Conan Edogawa breathed in and out unsteadily on the other side of the door.

He whispered, vulnerable for the first and only time Richard had witnessed since he'd first emergency-ejected himself into their lives, "Yes."

Richard shifted his weight forward onto the balls of his feet and opened the door without announcement. Conan tumbled inside in a tangle of grubby hands and backtalk and wrecking-ball velocity. "Then go to bed," Richard said, tossing him back onto his sleeping bag. "My rules. Or Rachel's rules. Either way don't be a dick."

Conan tremulously shoved his crooked glasses up onto his nose with his knuckle.

Richard flopped face-first onto his bed and expelled every single aerosoled molecule of his stress out his nose before yanking up the sheets. Rachel had better not have been lying about the fucking pie.

.

Rachel enabled his laziness up to noon until she figured out his tragic death rattles were him shaking the painkillers in their container. "I think you can safely get up to go to the kitchen now, Dad," she said dryly as she took his latest plate of pasta. "Didn't you say you had work to do?"

"I'm doing work." He'd heroically helped watch her drag the living room's television inside his room and had then courageously supervised her journey to find the TV guide. "I'm staying awake through the lullaby of your incessant nagging."

"I'm going back to school tomorrow, so you're going to need to relearn how to be independent for a few hours."

"Kind of liking the built-in maid service. You sure you can't take a leave of absence? We can just say you're apprenticed to a famous detective and he can't solve crimes unless you make him waffles."

"We don't have the equipment to make waffles."

"See, all the more reason for you to quit school," Richard frowned. "You haven't even completed the most basic initiation ritual of buying a waffle iron. Education's a distraction from the things in life that really matter. What good is that school if they haven't even taught you how to make waffles?"

"I'll make sure to ask my teachers." Rachel left the room with his dishes. "Get up, Dad, seriously. Take a shower."

Richard washed off his decay with a bar of soap and then stole her strawberry shampoo because his own was six centimeters harder to reach. Despite her newfound hardassery on independence, Rachel paused her history homework to steady him by his elbow as he clonked down the stairs to the agency. "Call me on the phone upstairs when you want to come back up," Rachel said. "I already put a blanket and pillow on the sofa earlier, so take a nap there if you're tired. Not your desk. I kept the sign flipped today, so there shouldn't be any clients. Don't answer the door."

Richard took a nap on the desk. He managed to get partway through two of his background checks with a handful of well-placed phone calls and rainchecked the rest to be completed once he could leave the office. Meguire came by late that afternoon with the bread and seemed satisfied with Richard's verticality. "Doesn't look like you have the usual headache," Meguire observed, stealing the bottle of beer from him mid-swig and replacing it with a cup of water from the dispenser in the corner. "I'll let the chief know you're back up for consult after this weekend. That reminds me."

Richard's nose caught the little package Meguire tossed him. "Get-well present from Kay," Meguire said. "Sends her regards. She was going to get a gift certificate to a real casino but I told her not to enable you."

"Look at this!" Richard beamed, turning the miniature slot-machine keychain over in his hand. "Why is it you never give me anything this great? All you ever do for me is take Eva's side and steal my thunder."

"I'd tell you how short your memory is, but at this point it'd be making fun of a medical situation," Meguire said. "I'm heading home. Tell Rachel I said hi and to call me if anything else happens."

"Hey." Richard looped the keychain onto his pinky for safekeeping and tucked his unlit cigarette into his pocket as he accessed the top drawer of his desk. He pulled out an envelope and tossed it over his paperwork to Meguire. "Here."

Meguire picked it up and opened it. "I couldn't find the receipt from the store but I figured that would about cover it judging by the supplies I found in the kitchen," Richard said. "Anything else she got from the pharmacy, just let me know and I'll budget it into next month's expenses."

Meguire was unreadable. He thumbed through the bills slowly. "If it's not enough I can get more after the tails this weekend," Richard said. "Sorry to put you out."

Meguire didn't reply. After a minute he stirred. He pulled one bill out, pushed the rest back in, and tucked the flap under the lip of the envelope to close it.

Richard spilled his water mid-swallow as the envelope's corner smacked against his forehead. "You're a fucking idiot." Meguire held up the bill over his shoulder as he exited. "I'm taking this to replace the caramels you porked down at the station. Invest the rest of it into therapy."

"Kay's not married, is she?" Richard was pretty sure she wasn't. "Think she'll give me her number if you ask her for it? I get the feeling she wouldn't be the type to steal my beer."

Meguire shut the door with a clap that ricocheted in Richard's sinuses. The desk phone rang at Richard's elbow a second later. "Who did you piss off just now?" Rachel said. "I told you not to answer the door."

"Bring me pie," he said, and hung up. He was busy or something.

.

Conan was back to his usual obfuscating cheer at dinner that night. He'd insisted on bringing Richard his drink from the kitchen but was otherwise operating on a normal frequency, keeping up a stream of chatter with Rachel over the upcoming school art festival as they'd set the table. Rachel, who as far as Richard had observed had regained her both color and composure that afternoon, seemed happy with the return to normalcy as she doled out what remained of Meguire's leftover pasta.

Floating somewhere between laziness and genuine fatigue, Richard listened with half an ear as Conan described the clay projects and murals and how they tied in with the endangered animal studies the upper grades were spearheading. Rachel shot him an inquiring look bordering on concern as she served him his portion, but he waved her off with a yawn. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm actually sort of looking forward to it now," Conan said. "They have a real wildlife rehabilitation expert coming in to show us the animals. I've studied them in the past, but I've never actually seen a Bolivian armadillo in person before. Did you know that people turn them into carnival rattles? That and domestic dog ownership is what's apparently behind the decline in the population. Isn't that sad?"

"That's such a shame," Rachel sighed, but smiled at him fondly. "I'm really glad you've changed your mind, Conan. It's so nice to see you enthusiastic about school for once."

"It's not so bad." Conan speared a meatball. "There's been more stuff that's been interesting to me lately. A lot's changed in the curriculum. There's more emphasis on other cultures now."

"Changed since when? Since kindergarten?"

Richard watched the meatball still a moment in Conan's cheek. "Right, that's what I meant," Conan laughed, rummaging it to the other side to speak around it. "Maybe I just wasn't having fun at first because I was missing all of the old stuff I used to do. But gee, first grade sure is fun now."

Richard managed to get through half his plate of pasta before fatigue won. He excused himself with a yawn and again fended off the flicker of Rachel's concern across the table. He knew his body well enough to sense that one more night of sleep and a morning coffee would set him back on his shelf.

He brushed his teeth and set his alarm for an hour that didn't suck as much as the others. When he wandered back out into the hall to adjust the thermostat, he passed by the sight of Conan sprawled on his belly in front of the television set, elbows propped on the carpet and chin resting in his hands, watching a documentary on emus.

His head had felt a little strange since dinner but his stomach and pulse were steady. He wandered over to the sofa and collapsed onto it with a grunt, rubbing his eyes with amicable exhaustion as the soothing tones of the narrator muted beyond him. "Sorry," Conan said. "I know you like watching Torrential Hearts. I'll bring you the remote."

"No. S'fine."

Conan's legs kicked rhythmically. His heels bobbed against his back. "Did you know the emu is an important cultural icon in Australia? The aboriginal Australians featured them a lot in their mythology."

"Nope."

"It stuck around even after British colonization. It's sort of their national mascot."

"No kidding."

Rachel's door was open down the hall. She was humming under her breath as she picked out her clothes for tomorrow.

Richard could see the light from the television play on the inside of Conan's glasses.

He thought about open doors. When he was finished massaging his face, he swung his legs up onto the sofa. He rested his cheek on the crook of his elbows and watched emus run at speeds of up to forty-eight kilometers per hour due to their specialized pelvic girdle. When he reflexively thumbed around his neck to test the ache of Maya's wire mark, he realized he could no longer locate it by feel. As long as he didn't think about it, it may as well have never happened at all.