Arnold grinned.“I’d like details.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Connor said.
“I really would.Anything I could use in an argument against the Chief.”
“Now let me think,” Robert said with mischief in his eyes.
Selena looked at her father.“Dad, don’t encourage him.”
Robert ignored her with the confidence of a man standing in his own yard.“First time I found out Selena was dating him, I thought, not him.Not that little punk.”
Connor laughed.“I was never little.”
“You were through these eyes.”Robert turned to Arnold.“High school boy with too much hair, too much mouth, and a truck that sounded like it had been built from spare farm equipment.”
“It was a good truck,” Connor said.
“It was a public nuisance.”
Selena took a drink to hide her smile.
Robert kept going.“He used to pull up outside the house like the whole street needed to know he’d arrived.Engine coughing, music loud, one arm hanging out the window.”
“That part may be true,” Connor admitted.
“And there was the mayonnaise.”
Arnold sat forward.“The what?”
Selena groaned.“Please don’t.”
Robert’s eyes lit up.“Principal’s car.Covered from hood to trunk.”
Connor pointed at Selena.“No charges were ever filed.”
“Because no one could definitively prove it was you,” Selena said.
Arnold stared at him.“You covered a car in mayonnaise?”
“I was young.”
Robert snorted.“You were trouble.”
Connor accepted that with a tilt of his glass.
Robert’s expression softened.“But not so much now.”
The yard quieted for a moment around that.
Connor looked down at his drink.The past few days had left marks no change of clothes could hide.Warren Holt.Victor Schmidt.Marlene running through the woods.Renee Beaumont in handcuffs.Morimer’s estate and whatever private debt still hovered there, even if Connor kept saying unconvincingly that it would all work out.
Selena had not asked him again.To her, Morimer’s silence felt less like mercy than patience.
Today was not the day to figure out that mess.
Today belonged to sunlight, grilled meat, and her father smiling at people in his yard.
Arnold broke the pause by crumpling the empty chip bag.“Agent Raven, when will you be back next?”