Valentine's Day. Wonderful timing, from a certain perspective. When he'd arranged this meeting that detail had escaped him—he'd been so jittery about talking to Lance at all that he'd blurted out the first day that had come to mind, and Lance hadn't said anything about it. Encouraging. Maybe.
Skip had always expected that when things went bad, it would be a mistake on his end, because there were only so many times you could fleece someone down to the skin and scurry back to the same bolthole before somebody put two and two together. Lance couldn't hide him forever, even if he'd had intelligible motives for hiding Skip in the first place, which...he did, and didn't. They had rarely talked about the thing that had grown between them in explicit terms, first out of hesitation and then habit, though that assumed he understood why Lance did anything. Which he did, and didn't.
Anyway, what a surprise when something went hideously wrong at the manse while Skip was on a "business trip"—a joke that had ceased to be funny immediately and he knew it but that wasn't going to stop him—and next thing he knew Lance was "dead" and he had to find a new safe house in a hurry. Dead in quotes from the start, because Lance had never faked his death before and while he'd done a decent job for an amateur, you had to lie pretty hard about most things to fool Skip. Should've faked being psychic instead, that would have worked much better. Now there was another awful joke he'd have to keep from bubbling to the surface while he was in there.
It had taken years to track the man down, though—Lance might have been a poor liar but he was always phenomenal at covering his tracks. And of course there was the simple matter that Skip would never have guessed someone that attached to luxury would go to ground in a place like the one he was now approaching, a houseboat that hardly seemed large enough for one drifting around a swamp where it never stopped raining and always seemed to be dark. That was the problem with faking your death, you lost all your assets, which was one of the reasons Skip had always done his best to avoid it. Not that he usually had that many assets to lose.
The door creaked open before he could knock, which was creepy, in a reassuring way. He ducked inside before he could overthink it. After all, he'd worked years for this moment.