"There are two witnesses that place him at the scene," Adam points out.

"Credibility, Adam," Eris says, putting a piece of lettuce in her mouth.

"First of all, there's two of them," Adam insists, rustling through the papers. "How can you say two witnesses are both uncredible? Not to mention that they have no history of anything illegal or bad."

"Two options," Eris says, pushing around a tomato. She hates tomatoes, but Adam made the salad, and so she'll eat it. "You link them and give them a motive to lie. Second option—you make them uncredible. You meddle."

Adam gives her a look. He's sitting on the floor, papers spread over the coffee table. "Meddle," he repeats.

Eris sets the bowl on the table, leaning back into the couch. "Chase them into a photo radar ticket. Put something in their pocket while they leave the store so they'll get caught. Meddle."

Adam waves her off. "That's illegal," he says.

"Welcome to the cutthroat world of law," she replies.

Adam shakes his head. "Is there no way to put bad people away without doing something immoral?"

"The law is structured to let a thousand criminals go before they put away someone innocent. So in most cases, no."

"It's a broken system," Adam concludes.

Eris points to him. "Bingo."

Adam does anything to distract himself. He runs, lifts, does anything that strains him. When Eris is there, they argue nonstop about court cases. Last night, he'd showed her an article about a downtown incident where a man shot his wife in anger. She'd made some comment about how she'd probably file for divorce when she woke up from her coma.

"The gun control is all wrong," Adam had muttered. "They kill too many people to let just anybody have them."

"Guns don't kill anybody," she'd said. "Neither does cocaine or gin. They're all nothing until somebody decides to make them something."

Adam had raised his eyebrow. "Is that your brand?" he'd asked. "A drug dealer that doesn't do drugs? People pay you their life earnings for what you see as just white powder?"

She'd grinned. "It's the art of the wielder, Adam. You are all the more powerful to possess something with the ability to kill someone, and not be afraid of it."

Adam had glanced over at the glasses of water on the table. He imagined they were gin. Just a liquid. Absolutely nothing until Adam gave it power.

Tonight, he gets a phone call from Wilkes. He looks at it. Four weeks, one month. He reaches over, looks at Eris as he answers. "Sergeant Wilkes. Good to hear from you," he says.

"And you, Hughey," Wilkes says. "Look, I know you're on hiatus, but you're coming back in the next few days, isn't that right?"

Adam clears his throat. "That's right. What's going on?"

"Things are picking up on the Diakos case these days. We might actually have some shit going on."

Eris can't hear the phone. She reaches for her salad, stabs another tomato with her fork.

Adam swallows. "About that. I think I'm going to ask to get taken off that, Wilkes. I'll work on something else."

"She's going to jail, Adam," Wilkes says. "We're damn sure of it this time. You've been on her for years. Don't you want to be apart of this?"

Adam watches her push around a piece of lettuce. Take down Eris, replace her with someone that brings back the violence of the drug trade. Replace her with someone who laces. Someone worse.

Adam gets to his feet, walks down the hallway, away from Eris. She looks up. She could go over and listen, could eavesdrop, but he wouldn't like that. She goes back to her tomato.

"Wilkes," Adam says, shutting the door to the bedroom. "Have you ever thought about how nothing ever comes out of Nyx laced? I mean, everybody laces, especially with fentanyl. But the fentanyl that comes out of Nyx is always safe if it's not taken in bulk. There's none of this deadly mixing happening that kills everyone."

"What are you on about, Hughey?"

"I'm just saying. Nyx has no competition, meaning they don't have to resort to unethical dealings to stay afloat. Taking out Nyx is asking for something worse."

Wilkes frowns. "You cannot be serious, Hughey."

"I've just been thinking about it lately. Maybe it's worth going after the dealers who do lace."

"God's sake Hughey," Wilkes says. "You're still sleeping with her."

Adam shakes his head. "Not recently, Wilkes. I swear." That part is true. Not since Adam stopped drinking. He sleeps with her curled into his arms, sure, but not the other part. That's all Wilkes needs to know.

"Hughey, you have a point," Wilkes admits. "But that's not the way the law works. There is no grey area. There's just breaking the law and not breaking the law."

Adam glances at the door. Eris is still eating her salad, minding her own business. Adam hangs up the phone, telling Wilkes to keep him on the case. It's time for this to be over anyway.

Adam finds her washing her bowl in the kitchen. He leans on the counter.

"I'm going back to work," he says.

She spins the bowl on the counter with lithe hands. She looks up at him, puts the bowl away.

"I can't...live here when I do." Adam has been talking to Sarah recently, and she asked to speak to Eris. Not a drop, she'd told Sarah. Sarah had sighed. Trial run, she'd said. He can come back.

Eris walks over to him, leans beside him. "Are you saying on my case?"

Adam watches her. "I think so," he says. "But I'm a lot lower now. I won't really do much."

Eris lifts her brows. She knows that street Sergeant Clips is the head of her case now. He was a marine for six years before he left for the police. He has a brute force attitude, which doesn't work with Eris. That's why they put Adam on her—they needed finesse.

"I'm not your captor, Adam," she says.

Adam wants to reach out and touch her. "If you would just stop selling—"

"We'd buy a pretty suburban home?" she asks. "I'd become friends with Sarah and take turns babysitting Daphne? We'd get married? Have a little church ceremony?"

Adam lets out a long breath. "You make it sound so far-fetched, Eris. It's not."

Eris reaches out and taps his finger. "It is far-fetched. This is what I do. And the longer you stay with me, the less I'll like you. I'll get bored. You're fun and exciting to me now—and you will be for a while—but then I'll want to move on. I'll stop selling, and the thrill of being with you won't exist. That's how I am."

Adam knows that. He knows it never really made much sense in the first place.

"Then I guess I'm leaving," he says.

"I guess you are," she replies. It's soul-ripping, repulsive and crushing, the thought of him not being here. The thought of her falling asleep on her own. It's sickening, and she hates it. But she knows herself.

Adam looks towards the window, where the city glitters. "I think I'm going to buy an apartment. Give Sarah the rest of the mortgage. She'll keep the house for Daphne."

"You need money?"

Adam smiles and shakes his head. "No, no I have...savings. But thank you."

Eris watches his eyes flit over the penthouse. She wants to reach out and touch his face, his hair. He's him again, with his level-headed responses and his clear gaze. He's Adam again.

"Thank you for the court cases," he says. "For letting me live here. For fixing me."

"I didn't fix you."

"But you knew how to get me to fix myself."

"I once completed an online psychology degree," she replies.

Adam laughs, then sighs out the rest of it. He looks at her.

Come on, Adam, she thinks. One last time. Do it one last time. Fix it. Give it closure.

He leans forward, pulls her into a tight embrace. She can smell the cologne on his shirt. The freshness of him.

This isn't enough, she thinks. I want more. Give me it all. One more time. Do it right this time.

He pulls away a little, puts a hand behind her neck. Kisses her like he means it. That's it, Adam. One last time.

He lifts her onto the counter, kisses her chin. Her face, her neck, her fingers, every graceful part. It's him again, with his calculated fingers and his smooth actions.

The part Eris loves the most about mythology is the tragedy. Nobody ever seems to get a happy ending. Nobody ever seems to be inherently good or bad. Families fall apart, stories never get closure, people pine, people die, people fall desperately in love and never get to marry the love of their lives. There's something about those things that she finds intriguing. Because this is a broken system and a broken world.

To Eris, it's so much more romantic and memorable to go down in a fiery haze. To die spectacularly, thrown across headlines or tossed off some sort of cliff. Die with an avalanche chasing her, burying her body is thousands of particles of snow, leaving the world to wonder what happened. To go down as some marvelous mystery people will spend their lives searching for the answer to.

She knows how easily she destroys things, how easily she complicates things. Things don't last with her; it's never enough. It never ends up ending nicely. She likes that. She likes that things won't get domestic, won't get simple.

That's what makes it so fun. Feeling like she might die on a slope, feeling like she might get caught, feeling like she might fall in love. It's just so freeing.

He takes her to the couch, where she can see the city behind him. She kisses him like this is the part right before the tragedy, where they fall in love and never end up together. Tragedy, chaos. Living. Isn't it all the same?

He whispers to her three words before she falls asleep. They wrap around her soul, tattoo themselves in her mind. She doesn't whisper them back, but that's because he knows.

He's gone when she wakes.