“Okay,” she returned, far more calmly than I expected. “The first thing you need to do, Rowan, is settle down. Biting people’s heads off isn’t going to help the situation. Especially when the head you’re biting off is mine. I’m on your side, remember?”

“Yeah, well you’ll have to excuse me. I’m still trying to pry a knife out of my back that was put there by someone else who was supposed to be on my side.”

“Your friend the cop? The one who arrested Felicity?”

“I wouldn’t exactly call him my friend. Not now. Not after this.”

“You might need to take a step back and look at it from a different perspective, Rowan.”

“I’m not so sure that there is another perspective on this.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she replied. “Think about this. You’re in a big city where they usually frown on having police officers arresting their friends. You aren’t in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and there’s no choice in the matter. It would be better for the department to avoid a conflict of interest like this.”

“Yeah, so what’s your point?”

“My point is that your friend probably had to pull some major strings to be allowed to make the arrest rather than allowing someone else to take her in. He most likely saw what he was doing as a favor.”

My reply was so sharply edged with sarcasm I’m surprised I didn’t cut my own tongue. “Yeah, some favor.”

“I suspect he was trying to spare you from the anguish of having strangers show up and haul Felicity away.”

I stayed silent for a moment and thought about what she had just said. I finally replied, “Well, I guess he did make it a point to repeatedly tell her not to say a word. The other cop with him wasn’t real excited about that at all.”

“You need to give your friend some credit, Rowan. I’m sure he was only doing what he thought was best for his friends, given the situation,” Her statement was punctuated by an electromechanical “ding” in the background then the hollow quality that had surrounded her voice disappeared. I could hear a droning background noise and assumed she must have just stepped from the elevator in her office building and was on her way past the decorative waterfall in the lobby.