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“I lit a cigarette with his confession — cheap paper, smelled like regret — and watched the sunrise try to forget us both.”

I wasn’t even a smoker, so all I did was cough and feel the burning sting of smoke tearing through my nostrils.

Finding Buben hadn’t been easy. He was a self-described street artist with a passion for defacing private and public property alike with painted images of female breasts — or MGs, as Mrs. Cackleberry called them. She refused to say the word breast, like it might give her ideas.

Buben wasn’t a bad person. He was, in all honesty, a pretty good artist — just one with a singular fascination. Don’t we all? “Even gays love breasts,” he’d once said.

I didn’t hand him over to the police. Hell, I didn’t even know his real name — it had been written on the confession I’d just lit and smoked. Instead, I convinced Tee Tee to hire him as a cook. He was good at that too. It’d keep him out of trouble, and it’d give Tee Tee someone else to yell at.

I wasn’t sure what worried me more — that I’d just smoked his confession, or that I was starting to enjoy it.