Harris stirred to wakefulness a few times at night. Agatha's body would be spooned into his, so after checking that this wasn't a dream, he fell right back into his actual dreams, each one warmer than the next.

This time he wakes up to see a finger of sunlight browsing the room through the gap in the curtains. It stops at Agatha's eyelids, and they quiver.

"I'm happy," Harris says groggily. The hangover from making love when love isn't called into question is mild.

Agatha squints in the sunlight, yet smiles at him. "I'm happy."

Harris sits up in the morning's glow. It's Sunday. The sheet slips down from his shoulder. He's naked to the waist, and would be completely naked if Agatha wouldn't mind the sight.

Her gaze circles his chest, stomach and the tented sheet below it without blushing. Much has happened since last night, even when they were sleeping... they're a couple. He stretches out to her, nuzzles her forehead. The air chills his skin as the sheet rolls away past his hips.

"Sore?"

"A little."

He leans back, retrieves the sheet, ties it around his waist. Slow does it. "I'll make breakfast."

Make breakfast, plus while away ten hours before he can take her to the bedroom again. A part of him—the obvious part—aches, resenting the wait, pointing out they're in a bedroom right now with a warm, naked, sleepy woman waiting. Slow does it, buddy.

He isn't arguing with his own body parts, is he? Okay, he is. That's how it goes some days, eh? He shuts his eyes for a second, focuses. There's a shower to his right. Quite convenient.

While he fidgets in place, Agatha flips in bed and tugs on his hand. He leans in for a kiss.

"Harris, it's Sunday. Grab a shower and let's go grab some coffee. You'll tell me what's going on with your work—"

He winces. "It's all crap."

She kisses him again. "I'll empathize so much more, if I have a good cup of Joe in my hand."

After a quick pause, he gives in. He'd sell his soul for her kisses. "Okay."

"Once we're back, you can cook up a storm, honey. I need to catch up on work."

He sigh-groans. "I thought you were kidding about the long podcast about my weak character."

Her lips graze his nose. "Never weak! And that's not what I'll be doing."

The blush blooms in the small hollows under her cheekbones. He kisses it, half-expecting it to taste like strawberries. It's better—a hint of jasmine from her cosmetics and her own smell.

"After my engagement to Oliver, Leungs formalized my position in our family business," Agatha explains, while threading his hair. She straightens it, lets it curl back in. "I suppose they felt I was in the right mind. I want to prove that I am, no matter who I love."

"Damn right!" The sparkle in her eyes, the intense sense of pride for her overshadows his creeping fear. But it's still there, like a paper cut. "Does this mean you'll have to return to Singapore, sweetie?"

His breath hitches. She can't just leave him, can she? Their relationship is only one night young.

Agatha pats his shoulder. Her tongue circles her teeth under her lip. "I'll have to. But I'll find a work-around so we can be together as much as possible."

He really has to inhale. Oxygen trickles into his lungs and he shoves away the clawing anxiety. "We will."

Who knows how his hearing at work would end. Maybe all his worries will be for nothing and he'll be a free operator. Sarkisian Senior is clearly on the mend. His mom is pragmatic. And Singapore is a pleasant city, so long as he stays out of the direct sun. The life beat is fast there, and he can retrain, become a worker of the future. He opens his mouth to tell her all that, but her phone rings.

They exchange a wordless glance: Sunday, before seven am!

Agatha jumps out of bed and palms the ringing phone. "Good morning! No, no, please don't apologize! You didn't wake us up—"

She holds the phone down by her cheek to her shoulder and uses her hands to slide the walk-in closet's door open. One half of the closet is colorful and choke-full. The other half starkly displays a stack of store-folded t-shirts in shades ranging from white to black. Three pairs of jeans bend over the hangars. His and hers, huh?

He smiles, imagining her things eventually making their way into all those empty spaces. This day will come...

"Harris." She puts the phone on the speaker and Lonita's voice says, "I'd like you to come downtown right away, Agatha. I understand that it's inconvenient with Harris barely out of the hospital—"

"I'll be there in half-and-hour tops."

She hangs up the phone and glances at Harris. "They got a match for Oliver in one of the police databases. They want to see if I can identify..." her words turn into sobs.

Harris is next to her in an instant, massaging her shoulders, pressing her back into his body for comfort. "You wanted to go out for coffee anyway, right? So, let's go."

"Are you sure you want to go all the way to the station? Don't you need to rest?"

"They have chairs over there. And coffee."

Her chortles are brittle, more like hiccups than laughter. "If a police station is the place to get the best coffee in Milwaukee, I feel sorry for this town."

***

The break room at the police station is achingly familiar to Harris, despite never having been there before.

It has metal-framed chairs with thinning cushions, brown-on-brown checkered linoleum on the floor, granite imitation counter and print-outs of memes appealing to wash one's own dishes over the sink. The green plush couch in the corner looks like someone has simply brought it from home ten years ago, and the bosses closed their eyes at this glaring violation of purchasing protocols ever since.

The general ambiance is of cleaning in progress, never quite finished, and never quite abandoned. Today, someone had abandoned a crushed paper cup with a slick of coffee under it next to the sink on an otherwise spotless counter. Tomorrow, a garbage can might overflow or someone would pull all the chairs to one table.

Basically, switch the staff trudging down the hall out of their dark-blue uniforms, and he'll be right at home. Even the drifting strings of the conversations in the halls and the periodic loudspeaker announcements have the same edgy, rough-and-ready vibe as at his native firehouse.

The coffee isn't as bad as all that either. The PD coughed up dough for an industrial-capacity Keurig. Sure, a connoisseur like Oliver—

Harris grips two warm mugs with coffee tighter. Oliver is going to be savoring prison brew soon if he has any say in it. That's why they are here.

He traverses the land of cubicles to reach the hall with the meeting rooms, checks the room number and nestles Agatha's latte and his own dark-and-strong in one hand. Knocks with another.

"Come in," Lonita calls.

Harris is yet to come to grips with the fact that her dad's living with someone other than his mom, let alone Lonita, their neighbor. He is still more comfortable seeing her separately from dad.

On her own, she has the look of a neighbor who doesn't miss a thing. Probably not a terrible trait in a detective.

She's curvy, but her khaki shirt fits her well and is tucked into her blue jeans. Over that Lonita wears a loose cotton blazer with sleeves ending just below elbows. Beaded earrings dangle in her ears. Her hair is wavy, and used to be stark black before the gray came in—not much different from his own, despite their different heritage. She doesn't cover gray and that also fits her well.

She booked a small room with no frills for their meeting. A rectangular conference table. Four chairs, a pair on each long side of the table. The PD's mission statement poster on the wall; and, thankfully, it's not even too too cringy. An opaque light fixture sits at the exact center of the ceiling.

Mom would have had a fit, if she saw this place. In her opinion, offices must offer some whimsy to increase morale and boost productivity.

Normally, Agatha would be enough to illuminate any room she walks in, but today she's withdrawn into herself. She sits straight-backed across the table from Lonita.

When Harris left to bring the coffees, Lonita was trying to have a small talk while she was plugging her laptop into a hub of sockets and plug-ins in the middle. She gave up since.

It almost feels claustrophobic, once Harris shuts the door behind him with his foot. He places the mugs onto round coasters with the Milwaukee PD logo and lowers himself into the vacant chair on their side.

"Thank you." Agatha cranes her neck at him. Her eyes are large with apprehension, but he can't blame her. The gray room is unnerving the crap out of him too. He slides the latte closer to her and takes a sip of his espresso.

The door opens up and closes again, admitting the second cop.

His name tag reads Joe. He's a black man, in his prime, so obviously larger-than-life Harris can imagine Lonita and others calling him Little Joe. He wears a khaki shirt just like Lonita, only his pants are gray, giving an impression of being from a suit, with the jacket gone missing. His wedding band is so wide, it nearly covers the first joint of his ring finger. There are three small diamonds set into it—kids, perhaps?

Little Joe immediately starts talking, with a languid drawl. Texas or Oklahoma? Whatever his accent is, Harris leans forward involuntarily, afraid to miss a single word. This is for Agatha.

"We've had some luck. I don't trust Fate, but I'll take it." Little Joe beams.

Harris' insides churn. Wow, that's new. He isn't cerebrally jealous like with Oliver. His body's having an atavistic reaction to a big guy talking to his girl. He'll need to work on that.

Lonita cuts in. "We found a match here, in the States. For fingerprints, from all things, not the DNA."

Are the fingerprints dated now, like the cassette players or something?

Agatha gulps. "Is it why... Why it only took a week?"

"Yes." Lonita turns her laptop around, to show them a photograph of a young man.

Harris would have preferred it to be a mugshot in a prison jumpsuit, but it's not, just regular baggy clothes on a regular adolescent guy.

"Week is nothing actually!" Joe explains. "This came from a 2008 file, so I had to excavate the paper trail through the HQ's basement. The case didn't go into the electronic records after we've changed the record-keeping system. It was supposed to be purged altogether, because our suspect was a minor, but I had a hunch. I told myself, "what if I check the basement, ah? Aha!""

A minor?

The color of the photograph on the screen has faded, but the guy was pasty, except where his cheeks and forehead had flared with acne. Pale eyes, hazelnut if one wants to be generous to their color. The stubble is uneven on his jaw, plus a patch on the chin: an attempt at a goatee. He's likely in his older teens, caught just at the cusp of being charged as an adult. If he was charged.

"I don't think it's Oliver?" Harris looks at Lonita and Joe. Is this a trick question? "Is it?"

Agatha shrinks in her chair, clasping her hands. Her latte steams, spreading around a sweet, milky smell for naught. She hasn't touched it.

"That's," she says, "that's... Oh, gosh. I can't remember his name. But I know him. I know him!"

She painstakingly scrunches her face and Harris jumps up to his feet. The meshed-backed chair is a torture on his long legs, anyway. He crouches by her side to hug her shoulders. "Here, sweetie, here... it'll come to you. I promise."

"Do you know where you might have met this man?" Lonita asks. Every word in that sentence is like a fishing hook, eager for a catch.

By the glow in both cops' eyes, Harris surmises that one, they didn't expect Agatha to ID the perp, and two—somehow, it's a win for them.

"He..." Agatha's tongue touches her lips. Her lipstick is glossy, masking their dryness. Her hands are in her laps, still clenched.

"This man was a nurse at the same adolescent mental health facility I was a patient at. From 2008 to 2010."

Little Joe extracts a pad from his pocket, a regular paper pad, with curling pages, and a stub of a yellow HB pencil. The pencil can't be over three inches long, so it all but disappears on the big man's hand, but it moves with lightning speed as soon as Lonita asks her next question.

"Can you think back and confirm he was nursing stuff for certain?"

Agatha nods. "Positive. He had more facial hair. A beard, I think. But I recognize him."

"Did he take a particular interest in you? Was he too friendly? Ever did anything unprofessional toward you or the other patients?"

Her hands suddenly release their grip on one-another.

Harris threads his fingers through hers. I'm here if you need me. I love you.

"I can't remember anything like that. He wasn't there for the whole time, only for a few months at the end. He was no different from the other nurses as far as I could tell."

"But he spoke to you?"

"Yes, a lot. It was a part of his job."

Joe stops writing. "We have a link and another alias. Agatha, did he work night shifts or day shifts?"

"Nights... I think." Her eyes hood while she's searching through her memories. "Yes. Yes, he worked nights."

Joe glances at Lonita. "I'll put in a request for a search for registered male nurses reported missing around this time period. It's a long shot, but fingers crossed."

"Yes. I'll get a warrant to request staff records."

The mention of a missing persons' file sends a chill down Harris' back.

"You mean, this guy has impersonated someone to get close to Agatha?" Someone murdered. When Agatha was fourteen. Fourteen!

He shuts up before cursing out the pervert, but Agatha's fingers quiver in his. And her voice, her voice quivers as well.

"This... this man stalked me in the hospital? A stranger?" After the pause stretches, she circles the three of them with wild, rounded eyes. "Or is this Oliver?"