Chapter 1

Somewhere in Detroit, now

T here it was. Got him!

I smiled at the screen as a rush of satisfaction filled me and I mentally patted myself on the back. Good job, Sophie! I had just uncovered the final nail that I would drive into his coffin, the last piece of damning evidence that meant I had him dead to rights: this giant jerk was cheating on his wife and thanks to me, the secret was coming out. Totally out.

It hadn’t been that difficult to uncover this information because the minor moves he’d made to obscure his tracks were both obvious and puerile. I thought that he would probably get his comeuppance for adultery but in my estimation, he had also earned some punishment for stupidity. Seriously, a bunny rabbit was craftier! He deserved to have rotten fruit and veggies thrown at him in public, and I would have been happy to show up with a bag of squishy tomatoes…except I never personally interacted with my clients or their targets. The only contact we had was via email and I didn’t even sign those with my name. I would have only been able to watch the produce humiliation from afar.

So my part in this drama was almost done. I added the latest details to my report, a narrative with supporting evidence of screenshots, dates, times, and video clips. Then I read it through, first to check for errors of grammar and spelling, and then to confirm a logical sequence. I tried to view the report as the wife would when I sent it to her, as if I were a newcomer to the information and was seeing it with fresh eyes. I made sure that each proof followed the next and I tried to hammer shut any opening where doubts could have crept in. The last thing my client needed at this moment in her life was to finish my account of his behavior and think, “Well, maybe he didn’t really. He might not have.”

Because this was what I got paid for: certainty. The wife had contacted me because she’d had questions and suspicions, but her husband had promised that he was faithful. He’d promised that he loved her and only her, and he’d sworn up and down that there was no other woman. He’d looked her in the eyes and put his hand over his heart, his left hand so that she could see how he still wore the band that she’d placed on his finger on their wedding day. He talked and talked until he had managed to talk her around…

Almost. He’d almost done it, but not quite. When she’d first contacted me, her tone had been close to apologetic. She was sure that she was wrong, she’d written in the form on my website. She’d confronted her husband but he had explained away all her concerns, and his explanations made sense. There was really no reason for her not to trust him…

Except that she didn’t. There was still something there, a feeling that she couldn’t seem to shake. So she’d found me and written that she needed to verify that he was being truthful. She wanted me to confirm that he was, in fact, still the same man that she’d fallen in love with and married ten years before, that he was the steadfast, loving husband and father on whom she’d always depended. She wanted me to prove that their marriage had only two people in it…

Nope. There were at least seven people currently in their relationship, and he sure wasn’t anything like steadfast. She’d asked me to check into his activities over the last six months, but I’d gone back farther and found evidence that he’d cheated for years. He was not, and probably had never been, faithful and loving.

As I cleaned up my report, reading through the sordid details of how he’d built their life together on lies, my sense of satisfaction ebbed. This always happened when I wrapped up a case. I was glad to catch these people and put them in their places, but it didn’t make me feel good to ruin the lives of their partners.

I looked at my notes. Sugar, they had three kids together, too. My client had said that she couldn’t possibly stay with him if he’d been cheating, which meant that I was effectively breaking up their family.

But that wasn’t my problem and I certainly wasn’t the person to blame in this situation. I typed a cover letter, briefly stating that I’d tracked down evidence of his affairs, and that the proof was attached. What she wanted to do next was on her but as I hit send, I cringed. No matter how I told myself that I shouldn’t, I always felt guilt about my involvement in the bifurcation of marriages, the breakups of businesses, the divisions of families. That was a definite drawback of this job.

One of the benefits was that it paid me to work how and when I wanted. I could, for example, be awake in the middle of the night and sit at my desk wearing only my underwear, and in fact, that was what was happening at this moment. I never, ever had to get dressed in nice-ish outfits to talk to people, since I never met my clients face-to-face. I never even had to wear a bra, because I hardly ever went outside at all. Makeup? No, I didn’t have that anymore. I sniffed and wondered when I’d last applied deodorant…it might have been a while.

But now I was tired, so I walked through the pitch blackness of my house toward my bedroom and immediately tripped on the plastic bags I’d left in the hallway. I banged hard into the wall and stood rubbing my elbow. How long had it been since I’d taken out the trash? And what day was it today? Sunday, I thought, late on Sunday night. That made sense since fairly recently, I’d been forced into a Friday dinner at my parents’ house. My sister Addie and her new boyfriend had come to pick me up for it and I’d been forced to sit in the back seat and listen to their disgustingly loving conversation—that Granger certainly looked imposing, but it had turned out that his insides were made of marshmallow fluff. At least, that was how it seemed to me when he kissed her hand, called her “honey,” and talked incessantly about their cat.

Marshmallow fluff. I was briefly sidetracked as I considered that I would love to eat some right now. But first? I would take out the trash. My pickup day was Monday and technically, it was already early Monday morning. I grabbed a bag, thinking how happy it would make Addie because she was usually all over me about the state of my house. Maybe I would text to let her know about my clean-up efforts, except that she was probably asleep. Or it was possible that she and her new boyfriend were still up and involved together, which would also mean that she wouldn’t answer. Not that I expected her to be at my beck and call, but it was a little hard to acknowledge that, just like our sister Nicola, Addie now had more important things to do than bother with me.

It was nice to see her so happy, though. I stopped to put down a garbage bag so that I could open the front door, but I paused and sighed a little instead of charging right outside. I was glad for her and for the newlywed Nicola, because all of my sisters deserved someone sweet (except Brenna, of course, because she deserved to have a lemon squeezed over a paper cut in between her fingers).

Out of our seven siblings, now the sister above me in age (Nicola, thirty-one) and the sister below me (Addie, just about to turn twenty-seven) had settled down. My brother Patrick was only twenty-five but he would be a dad soon, and Nic was pregnant, too. She and I had always been the “older girls” team, but not anymore. It wasn’t like we weren’t friends, but things had definitely changed over the last few years, and now she’d gotten married and was having a baby. But everyone was so excited about that, including me.

Kind of. Yes, sure, I was. I wasn’t running around buying kid books and teddy bears like Addie had already started doing, but I was excited. Marginally.

Whatever. I opened my door and grabbed the garbage bags again, then shuddered as a frozen wind blew right through me. It was terrible outside and there was suddenly snow on the ground! Of course, it was January in Detroit so that wasn’t out of the norm, but the last time I’d looked, I hadn’t noticed any snow. When was the last time I’d looked?

Well, I really noticed it now, because I was only in my undies. I slammed the door and felt along the wall for the coat that I left on a hook there, and then I kicked around on the floor in the dark until I found the slides that I usually put on when I took out the trash. Which I did, sometimes.

Better equipped, I tried it again and now I was slightly warmer than when I’d been mostly naked. I would still have to go fast, though, so I ran down my front path toward the street with the big bags bumping against my bare legs. The bricks beneath my feet were also covered in the stupid snow and there was moss under that, since it grew there on its own and I had never bothered to scrape it off. Icy particles filled my open-toed, rubber shoes and, after just a few steps, fully froze my feet. I skidded slightly as I threw the garbage toward the curb, then I spun around and raced back toward my house, only huffing slightly. Ha. I was the queen of speed! I knew that both Nicola and Addie had taken up exercise and they’d been smug about how I was such a couch potato compared—

As I put my weight onto the right slide, it slid. My foot went out from under me because these smooth soles had squat for traction, which was why most people didn’t wear them for running—

I screamed when I flew into the air, not a delicate, gentle-lady squeal, but more of a deep, double-barreled yell. Then I landed hard. My body slammed into the bricks and that stupid snow was no kind of cushion: my head bounced off the ground like when my little sister Juliet had played basketball (she was the sporty sibling in our family). I lay there unmoving because I couldn’t think of what had happened or what I was supposed to do next.

“Ow,” I said out loud. My hair had flipped forward and mostly covered my face but I could see through it enough to look up at the sky above me, full of wispy clouds and dim, blurry stars. “What just happened?” I asked them. Oddly, I thought I might have been hit by a coconut but that couldn’t have been right…right?

In the distance, I heard a door close and then I also heard footsteps crunching over the snow. “I just called the police,” someone announced. “You better get the hell out of here.”

“What?” I asked. I had never been arrested, but I had gotten a few parking tickets and one for an illegal left-hand turn. “I didn’t see the sign!” I defended myself, but I figured I should probably get a move on. So I tried to sit up, but it didn’t work. I made another noise due to the pain and dizziness, more like an ogre-type grunt.

“Hey.” Footsteps crunched closer. “What’s going on here? You can’t do this on someone’s lawn.”

I tried hard to understand, but didn’t. “What am I doing?” I had to ask.

The voice was closer when it told me, “I’m not exactly sure, but you’re up to something. It’s fifteen degrees and you’re barefoot and topless. And bottomless.”

I found that my hands and arms worked ok and I felt around those areas. Yes, it was true that I had no bra on; my coat had fallen open, too, so the ladies were on full display. I moved my feet, which also worked, and also discovered that I wore no shoes. But I definitely had on underwear, which I told him. “I’m not bottomless because wearing underwear. Liar.” It was accurate, however, that I was pants-free, and I couldn’t really think of why I’d have been outside in the dark with no pants…something about garbage?

I heard him get even closer. “Holy shit,” he said. “Sophie? Is that you? Sophie Curran? I thought I recognized your voice!”

My arms, which were still working, moved so that I could brush the hair out of my eyes. “I am Sophie,” I acknowledged.

“Why are you out here naked? What happened to you? You had so much promise,” the man told me. “Now you live like this?”

“What?” I pushed more hair and I could see a lot better—or I should have been able to. I could definitely tell that someone was standing very close to me, and the outline of that person looked like a large-sized man. But for some reason, I couldn’t focus on him. My brain wanted my eyes to obey and give proper information, but it wasn’t happening. “My head hurts,” I explained. “I can’t see well.”

“Are you on something?”

“I think I’m on my front path.” I felt around with my hand again. “Yes, this is my front path.”

“What are you saying? You live here?”

“It’s my house,” I agreed, and I remembered why I was outside, lying on the ground in front of it. “I was taking out the trash and I fell.”

“Holy shit,” he repeated. “Ok, I’m calling an ambulance.”

“Are they going to arrest me?” I remembered that he’d threatened it earlier. “I’m not really naked, because of the underwear. I’m wearing a coat, too, and I used to have on shoes. They were really slippery.” I tried to turn over onto my side because I wanted to get up now, to remove myself from the ground.

“Stay where you are,” he told me, and then I heard him talking on the phone. It was easier to stay, but I had the sudden thought that I should cover myself. I did the best I could with the coat and it did feel better to have it over me. I blinked a lot and things got slightly clearer, too. One thing I realized was that I’d exposed most of my body to this man, a stranger who somehow knew my name. Someone who had been, maybe, out wandering through the streets in the middle of the night. I also knew that I was freezing cold, that my butt hurt, my back hurt, my neck hurt, one of my knees was killing me, and I had the worst headache of my life.

The man was still yapping on the phone but it was also obvious to me that I needed to get myself inside and find some aspirin, a whole lot of it. I also needed frozen food, I decided. When we were kids, Nicola had kept bags of peas and carrots in our freezer to apply to all our various injuries. I needed those bags again, in way too many places.

“Once, we put green beans on Grace because she got her head stuck under a bumper,” I mentioned. Grace was our youngest sibling and, in my estimation, the most accident-prone. Now she was turning twenty-one but at the last family function, she’d also gotten her head stuck in a tree.

“What did you say about green beans?” he asked. “No, don’t—”

But I needed to go inside. Now. I managed to roll onto my side and then raised myself onto my hands and knees, and from there, I eased back to sit on my heels. But then I stayed in that position with my arms out wide because boy, I was dizzy. The movement had the unfortunate effect of opening my coat and re-exposing my body to the world, which I didn’t notice until I was able to open my eyes again. It explained why my breasts were so cold.

“You always were stubborn.”

I looked at him again and I saw him for real. It could have been my head injury, but for a moment I had the feeling that time had looped or twisted somehow. Because this person was someone I hadn’t seen since high school, eleven years before. In the dark, with blurry vision, he looked just as he had back then; he had that thick, light brown hair with eyes that were almost exactly the same color, like butterscotch. He had the same straight nose, the same high cheekbones, the same way of tilting his head that had always reminded me of a bird.

Then I noticed some differences. He was not very birdlike anymore. He had grown taller, a lot taller, and that wasn’t only due to my perspective (as a person sitting on her butt on the cold ground, while he was standing). I was medium-sized among the Curran sisters but I’d always been shorter than he was, and I guessed that now, I’d be much shorter. He wore a winter coat which made him look larger but he was also bulkier underneath it, wider through the shoulders, broader across the chest, bigger all over—not so much like a human clothes pin, as he’d been as a teenager.

By now, my brain had functioned sufficiently to produce his name. “Danny?” I questioned.

“I go by Daniel now,” he answered. “Are you all right?”

“No.” I sure wasn’t, because this was absolutely confounding to me. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“No, I live here.” I was sure about that…but then I thought I better check my location. When I tried to turn my head, though, I got so dizzy and it hurt so much that I had to hold out my arms again and I made another weird moaning sound.

“Sophie,” he said, “why don’t you—”

“What are you doing at my house in the middle of the night, Danny?”

“It’s Daniel. I heard noises, something thumping and then a scream. I thought someone was breaking in, and I looked out my window and saw what I believed to be a naked corpse on my neighbor’s lawn. That was you,” he clarified.

“Your neighbor?” I asked. “What?”

He pointed diagonally across the street at a Tudor-style house. “I moved in a few weeks ago.”

“You did?” I shivered, not understanding why anyone would come to this place. It was so cold here—but I did remember something about Danny, about him and this neighborhood.

“I’m going to get you a blanket,” he told me, and he jogged through the snow and disappeared into that house, so I supposed that he really did live there. He emerged with several blankets which he draped around me, and that felt good.

“I saw that your house was for sale, a while ago,” I commented, because there had been a sign in front of it at one point. I also vaguely remembered one of my sisters saying that this was such a great street with all the old homes, most of them well-kept…it had been Nicola saying that, because then she’d made a face at where I lived and I’d told her to keep her opinions to herself. That wasn’t really an option with my big sister, though.

“I didn’t know you were here, either,” Danny said. “I never saw anyone coming in or out of your place, but I work a lot and maybe you only emerge at four in the morning.”

“I come in and out at a lot of other times, too,” I told him. That was marginally true.

“I had asked the neighbors about who lived in the pink house,” he said, casting his gaze to the stucco that my sister Addie and I had painted together. “They said it was a single woman but no one knew much about you. Someone mentioned that he thought your name was Sally.”

“It’s Sophie,” I enunciated carefully, and Danny smiled.

“I know that, Sophia Genevieve Curran,” he said.

I just stared at him. He did know my name, of course he did, because we’d been friends. We’d been very good friends, but that had been a very long time ago.

We both heard the sound of the siren, and while he easily turned in that direction, my own neck hurt a lot when I tried it. But I didn’t want to go in an ambulance, which I told Danny—although, I wasn’t sure why Danny Ryder would be on my street. What was happening? My head ached.

So I went to the hospital, and it turned out to be the one where my sister Nicola worked. I kind of forgot that until she showed up later in the morning and said, “Why were you running around like a crazy woman in the snow in the middle of the night, Sophie?” And she started to examine me herself, like the other nurses and doctors there hadn’t done it enough.

“I wasn’t running like a crazy woman, and I’m fine!” I snapped irritably. “I would have gone home hours ago except everything here took forever.”

“I’m so sorry that we weren’t up to your standards,” my sister said, but then bent to look me in the face. “According to your chart, you have a concussion but you’re ok. Are you really?”

I nodded but felt very emotional about it, so I didn’t mind when she hugged me.

“You knocked the crud out of yourself,” she remarked. “What shoes were you wearing?”

“Snow boots,” I stated firmly.

“I don’t see them in the bag of your possessions. I also don’t see your clothes and I notice that you’re currently wearing scrubs,” my big sister pointed out.

Marriage and pregnancy hadn’t mellowed her much and they definitely hadn’t compromised her detective skills. No one had ever been able to get too much past Nicola, so I had to explain that I’d been taking out the garbage (something she should have been happy about) and had suffered a little fall.

“Soph,” she sighed, and I shrugged. It hadn’t been a shining moment for me. “My next question is obvious.”

“No, I’m not going to stay with you until I’m better.”

“You are, so that wasn’t a question,” she informed me. “I’m actually wondering why Danny Ryder is here with you. I guess he calls himself Daniel now.”

I rubbed my temples, because my head didn’t hurt solely in the spot where I’d smacked it against the brick. It ached all over and my whole body felt kind of sore, too. “I think he moved into a house across the street from me.”

“Oh, the beautiful Tudor? I love that place,” she said, because now Nicola was all about home improvements. They were waiting to receive a windfall from her husband’s distant relative and then they were going to totally revamp their own home, adding on another floor with more bedrooms because they’d decided that they were going to try for a big family. Not as big as the one my sister and I had come from, but probably more kids than she needed.

“He’s not mad anymore?” she asked me.

“I guess not,” I answered. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on, though, and I rubbed my head again.

“Why don’t you rest?” she suggested, but all I wanted to do was leave and go home, which I told her again. My statement caused an argument between us because she was insisting that I had to go to her house, and in fact, she’d summoned someone to drive me there since Nicola herself couldn’t leave the hospital mid-shift.

She had called our second-to-youngest sister Brenna, who arrived at the emergency room with her customary bad attitude. I immediately said that I wouldn’t go around the corner with her, and her attitude got worse. “Why did I waste my time over Sophie?” Brenna sniffed angrily. “I came all this way to get her clumsy butt and now I’m being punished because she chose to run around like a crazy woman in the snow in the middle of the night.”

“You live ten minutes from this hospital and it was no hardship to drive over,” Nicola told her. “Sophie wasn’t running around like a crazy woman, either. Tell your sister that you’re sorry.”

Brenna looked at me mutinously but then said, “Sorry, Sophie.”

“As long as we’re all clear that I wasn’t naked,” I announced, and Brenna’s mouth dropped open.

“You were running around like a crazy woman in the snow, and also naked? What is wrong with you, Sophie?”

Nothing, that was the answer. Nothing at all was wrong with me but I wanted to go home a whole lot and I felt like crying again.

Brenna was already onto another topic. “I recognized a guy out there in the lobby. I remember him coming around our house,” she said. “Didn’t he go out with Addie? What is he, a stalker?”

“Danny’s still here?” I asked. I hadn’t been keeping great track of time and it was hard to know exactly when it was since the emergency department didn’t have windows. “He waited?”

“Oh, yeah,” Brenna nodded. “That was his name. I used to call him ‘Manny’ because he wasn’t anything like a man.”

“And we called you ‘Brat’ because you were exactly that,” I answered. “There was nothing unmanly about him. He was skinny, that’s all.”

“Scrawny,” Nicola corrected, and then shrugged when I looked at her. “He was really scrawny at the time, but he doesn’t look that way anymore. But Brenna wasn’t mean to him because he was too thin,” she continued. “It was because he was too nice. He was a nice person and she doesn’t respect that.”

Our younger sister nodded smugly, like it was some kind of compliment. “I thought he and Addie were perfect for each other,” she remarked. That definitely wasn’t meant as a compliment, because I knew she thought that Addie was a huge pushover.

I rubbed my head again as I thought about the past. Danny and Addie had gone out a few times, but it had been in high school. That felt more like a thousand years ago rather than eleven, and I doubted if she even remembered him now.

But he and I had been friends, good friends, and I remembered him very well despite our gap in contact. We had both written for our school’s newspaper and we’d been president and vice-president of the Spanish club. We’d worked on the yearbook, too, and he’d stood by me when I’d laid out a page that included a pointed piece (also authored by me) about the messed-up Homecoming celebration. I’d thought that our senior class had been poorly treated; the principal had cancelled the big rally because some of the dumb football players and their cohort had broken into the library on a weekend and made a huge mess. The guys had still been allowed to play in the important game but apparently the rest of us had to be punished, so the rally was taken away.

The loss of the pep rally, in my estimation, hadn’t been much of a loss at all. Those things were full of the same people getting celebrated again and again. They were all people like my sister Nicola, who had been a cheerleader and so pretty that she naturally drew the spotlight. Yeah, they were great—Nicola definitely was, but weren’t there non-athletes, non-popular, non-attractive students to celebrate, too?

So I hadn’t been sad about the cancelation, but I had thought that it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right that the players had mostly avoided punishment but the regular students, the ones who only wanted a fun day of activities outside of our usual grind, had suffered for their bad behavior. So I’d written about it for the yearbook but the faculty advisor had refused to approve it, even when I’d tried to stage a sit-in in front of the classroom where we had our meetings after school. I’d eventually been removed by the security officer who had told me to get off my butt and go home—it wasn’t the big, dramatic standoff that I’d imagined and had wanted to describe for the newspaper. Danny had written an article about it anyway and I’d followed up with a scathing editorial, which no one read because the people at our high school were not interested in literacy or in raising their consciousnesses.

“Why is that Manny guy here right now?” Brenna demanded, and our big sister told her that anyone could come to the hospital and then she reiterated today’s task. Brenna’s orders were clear: she was taking me to Nicola’s house for my forced recuperation. No, it didn’t matter what I said about it or what I wanted.

However, Nicola did get involved in doing her actual job as an ER nurse dealing with other patients, so she left me alone. When I was finally discharged, I told Brenna to bug off. But to make that happen, I had to promise her twenty dollars (once I got my phone and could see well enough to send it). She demanded compensation because even the Brat was worried about disobeying a direct order from Nicola.

“Fine,” she said. “You better not stiff me or I will tell Mom that you went to the hospital with a head injury.” It was a potent threat because our mother would have had a fit to beat all fits, and she would have remembered the incident for years. She would have brought it up constantly, reminding me of my naked fall and blowing it up to be the story of the night that I nearly died of frostbite or an attack by feral dogs. I nodded because I would have paid a lot more than twenty bucks to avoid that scenario.

Although she huffed angrily at my slow pace, my younger sister did deign to walk with me toward the exit. “Manny is still here,” she remarked, and pointed very rudely at where my old friend sat with the other people in the lobby in the plastic chairs. She also stared hard, blatantly eyeing him like she would another woman’s outfit.

“I guess he got a little better with age,” she noted. “But he still looks annoying.” Then, as I’d directed, she left. She didn’t say goodbye or wonder how I was going to get home and I watched her stride quickly out into the cold.

Good. Except now, here I was with a roomful of sick and unhappy people, and…

“Sophie.”

“Oh. Hi, Danny.” I looked at him, now standing in front of me, and realized that he was a lot bigger than I remembered. He was obviously taller because before, my nose had come up to his collarbone. Now it was more at a nipple-level. He was larger all over, stronger-looking and tough. In high school, I probably could have taken him out in a fight but now…I wasn’t up to fighting anyone, not at the moment.

“It’s Daniel,” he reminded me. “Is Brenna driving you home?”

“Uh, no,” I answered, because my sister was long gone. “Did you talk to her?”

“She stopped in front of me and said, ‘Oh, you’re that skinny guy who used to bother my sisters.”

“You didn’t bother anyone,” I answered. “Brenna is…”

“I remember her very well. Do you need a ride or did Nicola deal with it?”

He would have also remembered how Nicola had dealt with everything in our lives. But I responded that I had paid Brenna to leave and now I was going to get a car, and he said that he was driving back to the same place, anyway. “We’re neighbors,” he stated. “You can come with me.” He also said that I should wait while he pulled up. He did, then got out and opened the passenger door of his truck and helped me into the seat. Things like that were exactly why Brenna hated him, all that niceness.

For the first few moments of the ride, I readjusted to the light and the movement of the vehicle. When I was better, we talked, and he asked me about the treatment and follow-up for my various injuries. But I was more interested in his presence. What was he doing back in Detroit and why had he stayed in that hospital for hours, waiting for me?

“I found you, my neighbor and former friend, naked and injured in the snow,” he stated in response to the last question. “Staying there was the decent thing to do.”

“Why were you there in the first place?”

“You screamed very loudly—”

“Why are you in Detroit?” I interrupted. “I heard that you were working in Maryland.”

“You were keeping track of me?”

I shrugged. “Not really. I ran into someone a while ago who mentioned it. If I’d wanted to know exactly what you were doing, I could have found out very easily.”

“Oh.”

There was silence and I thought how rude that had sounded. I sometimes got crap from my sisters, the ones who paid attention to those kinds of things, about how I spoke without thinking. “I did wonder about you,” I told him. “You left after graduation and that was it.”

“That was it,” he echoed. “I went to basic training and we fell out of contact.”

I let my eyes close because the sun was bright when it reflected off all that stupid snow. Danny leaving for boot camp wasn’t the entire reason behind why we had lost touch but I was tired. I was also feeling really dumb now that I was remembering how I’d lain naked on my lawn in front of him. He had thought that I was a strung-out burglar, and who could have blamed him?

“You ok?”

I opened my eyes briefly to see him and then shut them because it was so stupidly sunny. “Thanks for helping me out, Danny.”

“I go by Daniel,” he corrected.

“Daniel,” I repeated. “Sorry. It’s funny that we’re neighbors, now.”

“The world’s a funny place,” he agreed. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

He didn’t really sound like he regretted that, but I kept my eyes closed and didn’t think about it. Of course, insufficient use of my brain was how I’d ended up naked in the snow in the first place, but maybe I’d worry about that later.