“What’s wrong?” I said.

Shiloh shook his head slowly, definitely a rebuke. “You dumb shit,” he said quietly.

“What are you talking about?” I said, but he just kept giving me his level, reproving look.

Shiloh and I had never worked any cases together, so I’d never got a chance to see his interrogation technique. I thought I might be seeing it now.

“Do you know how many people die in that river every year?” he asked finally.

“Oh,” I said. “Vang told you?” My voice was a little high. The anger of people who rarely get angry is deeply unnerving. “I’m fine,” I said.

“What were you thinking?” he said.

“You would have done the same thing,” I said.

He didn’t deny it. “I didn’t first learn to swim at age twenty-three.”

“I was twenty-two,” I said.

“That’s not the point.”

I turned my back on him and swept the spilled laundry powder into the machine. Cranked the dial over to the warm-water setting, heard the muffled hiss as the cycle started.

Shiloh came up behind me and laid his hands on my hips. “I almost had a heart attack when Vang told me,” he said softly.

Forgiven, I felt a relieved, retroactive urge to apologize. Instead, I said, “I could’ve used you out there today.” He’d had experience with suicidal people; more than experience, a good track record. “She was my first jumper.”

I’d given him an opening to say, And nearly your last, but he seemed to have forgotten the issue. He leaned closer to my ear and said instead, “I can smell the river in your hair.” Then he lifted the half ponytail up and kissed the nape of my neck.

I knew what that gesture meant.

In our bedroom afterward, Shiloh was so quiet I thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep. I lifted my head off his chest and looked at his face; his eyes were closed.