“What’s wrong with my shirt?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
I sat on the back porch steps and drank coffee and watched him work. The sun came up over the trees and lit up the garden gold. Bees were moving through the squash blossoms. A robin hopped along the end of a row, looking for worms.
It was beautiful. It was honestly one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
And some man in a gray house had called it an eyesore.
I looked up at Brent’s deck. It was empty. The glass door was shut. The curtains were drawn.
Coward, I thought.
The inspector came at five minutes to nine.
He was young. Maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. Thin, with glasses and a short haircut and a county ID badge clipped to his belt. His name was Tyler Ostrowski. He drove a little white county car with a seal on the door.
