Chapter 2

I t was so totally inane that I wasn’t even sure of what to say. Also, I shouldn’t have been in the position to say anything at all—in my mind, this issue had been resolved and I was supremely exasperated that I was still dealing with it.

“Mrs. Horner,” I typed, and then paused for about the tenth time. Because here was what I wanted to tell her: “Mrs. Horner, please wise up. I’ve already demonstrated that your husband is a terrible person who cheated on you repeatedly. Like, at this moment, I believe that he’s in Ohio with another woman. Who does that? Who takes a girlfriend on a romantic vacation to Cleveland? I’ve provided all the proof that a reasonable person would need and if you can’t accept what’s staring you in the face, then I would suggest therapy rather than continuing to use my services. My advice is to spend your money on that and on a good divorce attorney.”

Maybe I didn’t always think before I spoke, but even I knew that I couldn’t write that to her. It was just so annoying—this woman was nutty, seriously delusional. I’d sent her my report on the night that I’d fallen in my front yard (or as I liked to refer to it now, the Naked Night). And by the way, there wouldn’t be a repeat of that because I had already sworn up and down to Nicola that I would not leave my house without proper attire, and I meant it—but in any case, I’d sent the report to Mrs. Horner and it had empirically demonstrated that that her husband was a jerk. Good luck, I’d signed off, and goodbye.

It had taken her a while to get back to me (two weeks) and I hadn’t expected to hear from her again. Sometimes people had questions after they read my evidence, but more often than not, my final communication with them was the depressing chronicle of what their partner/wife/boyfriend/et cetera had done to them. Good luck, and goodbye.

That was a point that my sister always argued about. She’d say things like, “Not everybody is guilty, Soph. Aren’t some of the people who hire you just a little too cynical?” That was Addie; she wanted to believe the best of everyone. But I’d found that when my clients suspected something, they were usually right. Maybe the problem wasn’t always exactly what they had been worried about—for example, I’d investigated a guy’s girlfriend and discovered that no, she wasn’t cheating, but she did have a giant gambling problem. Another woman’s partner hadn’t been stealing from their business, but she had been running a porn ring on the side (really gross, upsetting porn that had led to criminal charges).

In my job, I’d learned that where there was smoke, there was fire—and that thought led me into the kitchen to retrieve the wings I was reheating from last night’s delivery so that they didn’t burn. I removed the chicken from the oven and looked for some kind of plate, but then shrugged and decided that the foil I’d used (the last of that roll) was a good enough dish for me. Less to clean up, which was lucky since the sink was already full and my dishwasher had stopped working a while ago. I wasn’t sure how long it had been out of service since I didn’t use it very often, but breakdowns seemed to be a growing problem with things in my house. The toilet in the only bathroom wasn’t doing a great job, and when I’d retrieved the leftover wings from the refrigerator, I hadn’t needed to heat them as much as I probably should have. It felt much too warm in there.

Anyway, it had been two weeks since Naked Night and I’d just gotten a response from Mrs. Horner regarding the information I’d sent to her, my buttoned-up report that left no (or very little) room for her to doubt the conclusions. But despite my efforts, she had a lot of doubts. She wasn’t sure, she’d sent back to me. Could I please continue my investigation? She’d read all the terrible things I’d written but the man I’d described just didn’t seem like the one she knew, the husband with whom she shared her life. She was shocked.

Of course she was! This didn’t seem like the man she knew because she didn’t really know him at all. He’d been lying to her since the day they met. He’d been putting on a show and I was sorry that she was such a gullible audience, but there it was. As much as I wanted to type exactly that back to her, I sat down with my aluminum foil plate and composed a message that was much more polite.

Yes, I could continue to research her husband’s activities, I said, but I did not expect to find exculpatory evidence and I would not undertake the research with clearing him as my goal. If she understood that and also that my fee would be the same, no repeat-customer discounts, then I would begin round two. Since I was aware that she had a busy life, a few kids and a full-time job, I didn’t expect her to get back to me right away but I remained at my desk and stared at her email, thinking about what else I could do to establish the extent of her husband’s suckage. How I could verify once and for all that he was not, not in any way, the man she thought she knew?

And speaking of…I got up and walked again to the window that faced the street. Since Naked Night, I’d frequently made that brief trip, enough that I could have worn a little path on the wood floor. I had been watching from behind the cold, glass panes, my (clothed) body tucked a little to the side so that I wasn’t on display to the cars and pedestrians who went by. Over the past two weeks, I’d learned a lot about my neighbors’ habits by standing here.

First of all, I’d learned that there were a lot of those people. I hadn’t paid attention before to how many people and pets came in and out of the nearby houses. The humans seemed to know each other, too, because they usually waved and stopped to talk. They exchanged what seemed like pleasantries and the dogs sniffed one another cautiously and then romped on lawns. A woman from down the block walked a cat on a leash—yes, a cat on a leash, but it was very haughty when it encountered the other neighborhood denizens and wouldn’t do any romping while its owner chatted.

I saw a lot of people but I only knew one of them: Danny Ryder, or Daniel, as he had said a few times. And it was true that his recent history, or at least everything he’d done post-high school, had been under his full name. I’d compiled a complete bio on him, just as I did for all my clients and for my sisters when they got involved with a new man (although some of their relationships didn’t last long enough for me to bother). Their boyfriends had mostly been normal, except I’d found weird stuff about one of Grace’s guys (who had used three different names and social security numbers) and one of Brenna’s (he bought way, way too much cough medicine online to be anything but an addict).

Daniel Ryder had nothing weird. After high school, he’d enlisted, which I’d already been aware of. He’d served eight years in the military at various bases around the world, which was something he’d been interested in. He’d always wanted to see new places but he hadn’t been able to leave Detroit for as long as I’d known him, which was sixth grade up until we marched in our graduation. He had lived with his dad and that guy had a lot of problems, so all the money that Danny had earned from his various jobs had gone to household stuff instead of vacations.

I had winced when I’d also discovered out that Mr. Ryder, his father, had died. It had only happened in September, so just over four months ago. His dad hadn’t been that old but he’d had a lot of problems that his son had tried to deal with. I remembered Danny coming over for dinner, squeezing in at the table between my siblings (whoever was around and didn’t have some kind of activity, sport, or job that was keeping them away). He had never said much, maybe because he couldn’t have gotten a word in due to how much the rest of us had talked, but maybe because he was a naturally quieter kind of person. He’d always thought before he spoke, and there wasn’t time for that in my family.

Anyway, he’d sometimes eaten at our house, but he’d mostly gone back to his own to take care of his dad. That must have been why he’d returned to Detroit—

There he was. His truck turned onto the street, and I recognized it by its lights. They swung into his driveway and I watched the garage door open, moving silently to display a neat interior partially filled with boxes. He didn’t park inside there and that was why.

He turned on some exterior lights and then I could see a lot better. I kept watching as he opened the truck’s liftgate, removed more boxes, and added them to a stack. Then he stood for a moment with his hands on his hips, his head tilted down and his breath making white clouds in the cold air. He moved out of my line of sight and the garage door closed, and he didn’t leave again for the rest of the night.

Well, this was just silly, I thought the next afternoon as I lay in my bed. I had been wishing that I had sheets on it, since this mattress was kind of itchy, and I had been looking outside again, this time up at a grey sky. I’d also been deciding what day it was. Saturday? Saturday, that was it, because I’d received another family dinner invitation for last night that I’d successfully avoided. It was maybe noon or just past but I was still tired. I’d stayed awake for much too long, sitting at my desk but not working, and telling myself that I was acting ridiculously.

Now I was thinking that same thing again. Why had I been spying on Danny Ryder? I had been waiting for him to come home every day, watching at my stupid window like I was one of those pets I’d seen, probably a dog because the cat acted like it was too good for that kind of behavior. It actually reminded me of what I’d done as a kid when I’d waited for my father to get home from his office, how I’d hoped that he would be there before I went to bed. Now I was doing it as an adult. Why?

Yeah, it was dumb. That was the reason I got up off my mattress—maybe there were spiders and that was why it was itchy?—and went to the bathroom to get dressed. It took me a while to shower and do all the preparatory tasks for going out, mostly because I hadn’t done them in a while and was out of practice. For example, I started to put on clothes before I remembered that I needed deodorant first, and then I thought I should use lotion, and did I actually have any makeup?

I had a little, it turned out, but I spent much too long looking for it because the cupboard in my bathroom was disorganized and something, maybe an old tube of toothpaste, might have exploded in there. Or maybe an animal had gotten in. I wasn’t sure how that could have happened but in any case, I discovered a hardened mess of weird goo that made my search for beauty products a lot more difficult.

Eventually I looked at myself in the mirror and decided that I’d done enough. I had certainly prepped more than I usually did. I hadn’t achieved the same results as when my sisters had worked on me for Nicola’s wedding or for our friend Liv’s before that, but I was ok. And who cared, anyway? I was only going to talk to an old friend. Anything was an improvement over the last time he’d seen me on Naked Night.

I looked across the street from my usual spot in my office (and I did notice that there was a path that led to it, a shiny pattern of footprints marked in the dust). His truck was there, which probably meant that he was, too. So? This was no big deal. Lots of people chatted with their neighbors, which I’d witnessed from my window.

I closed my front door and walked across the street, passing another pedestrian as I went. It was the woman with the leashed cat and I stared at the animal and at her, and she gave me a look right back, eying me up and down. Was there something wrong with what I had on? I checked myself in the window of Danny’s truck but everything seemed fine.

He opened his door when I rang, because his doorbell worked. “Sophie,” he said, and he also looked over what I was wearing. “Hi. Did you need something?”

“No,” I answered. “I’m here to say hello.”

“Oh.” We both stared at each other. “Well, come on in,” he suggested, and I did.

“I do get out during the day,” I commented as I followed him into the house. It was very well-lit, I noticed immediately, which was different from my own. There were some lightbulbs that I could have replaced.

“I’m glad to see that you do. Are you going somewhere?” He gestured at my outfit and I also glanced down at it.

“Oh, no,” I told him. “I just felt like dressing up.” I had put on what I’d worn to the recent weddings and my sister Addie had told me I looked pretty in it. This dress was the nicest thing I owned by far, because most of my other clothing had gotten ratty over time and I hadn’t done much to replace it.

“Ok,” he answered. “Can you get you something? A glass of water? A beer?”

“No, thanks.”

“Ok,” he repeated. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine now. No problems at all.”

“Good.” We looked at each other.

“I read about your dad,” I told him. “I did look you up and I saw that he passed away. I’m sorry.”

Danny nodded slowly and sat down on his couch, a neat one with pillows that matched. “It wasn’t unexpected, I guess.” He held out his hand toward a chair. “Do you want to sit?”

I did. “Even if it wasn’t unexpected, it must have been hard when it happened.” I wondered if he’d come back to see his father in the eleven years since high school. Had Danny been here in Detroit and I hadn’t known? I’d told him that hadn’t kept track of what he was doing, and that was true: it had been a conscious choice.

“It was very hard when he died and it continues to be,” he concurred. “I was just getting ready to go over to his house again. Do you remember it?”

The Ryder place would have been difficult to forget, even though I had only seen the exterior. They had lived on a big piece of land, a combination of several large city lots cobbled together, in what could have been called a shack. But the amount of square footage and the dilapidated building they’d occupied weren’t even the standout parts. His dad collected stuff—a lot of stuff. Their home had been surrounded by old cars, old bathtubs, old equipment, old everything. There had been a high, imposing fence that separated their property from the street and behind it, his father had created a personal junkyard. They’d been in a pretty rough part of town, an old industrial area, so there weren’t a lot of neighbors to complain that it wasn’t kept up, not like how the people on my street behaved. Everyone here seemed to have something to say when a person forgot to mow her grass for a couple of years.

“I remember your house very well,” I answered. And I’d seen that the property was now in his name, instead of his father’s.

“I remember the first time that Nicola drove me home,” he said. “She wanted to call the health department and CPS.”

She had been appalled at what she’d seen there, the mess and the accumulation, but he had begged her not to intervene. They wouldn’t help, he’d told her. Please, please don’t.

“Did he ever clean it up?” I asked.

“No. There’s more now than the last time you saw it,” Danny told me. “Over the last decade, he kept busy collecting.” That final word had been more like a sigh.

“It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long but it also seems like everything in high school happened to someone else,” I said. “Does it feel that way to you?”

“Kind of.”

“You look different from how you did back then,” I pointed out.

“I grew a few more inches when I got into the service. I filled out, too.”

“You were a late bloomer.” That was what my grandmother would have called him, and she would have been correct. He really had bloomed, because he was not only taller and filled-out, but he was also a lot more handsome than he had been. Well, Addie had always thought he was handsome and that was why I’d pushed him into asking her out. It hadn’t worked, though.

“Addie’s going to get engaged,” I mentioned, in case he was still thinking about her.

“Oh?”

I nodded, watching his face. He didn’t seem upset by it.

“That’s nice,” he commented. “What are your other sisters doing? What about Patrick?”

I gave him a little more information, like that Juliet now worked for a big commercial real estate company downtown, and Grace was still acting as if she were a kid. He’d already seen that Brenna hadn’t changed, but at least she was employed. She hadn’t ever been a shirker. “They’re all ok, and you’re doing very well yourself,” I noted.

“How do you know? You said you hadn’t been paying attention to what I was doing.”

“I was busy with other things, but I just did your dossier,” I explained.

“My…excuse me?”

“It’s my business. I mean, that’s my job,” I told him. “I do research on people.”

“Like a private investigator? I never thought of you as sneaky.”

“No, I don’t follow people around,” I corrected. “I never even have to leave the office in my house. You can find out just about anything online. I get paid to dig up dirt and it’s a good living.”

“I thought you were going to be a journalist. That was what you wanted to do, that or writing books. Wasn’t it?”

I shrugged. “This pays better and I enjoy it. I’m helping people,” I added piously. “How do you like construction?” He had started working for a general contractor when he’d arrived in Detroit.

His eyebrows raised. “What else did you dig up about me?”

“You have no serious health problems, no arrests and no major driving violations. You own this home, with a reasonable mortgage. No kids, no wife, no ex-wives, but I saw that you were dating someone for a few years. Lisanne,” I mentioned. “She’s now married to someone else and is expecting their second child. She just found out that it’s a boy.”

“Really? Good for her.”

He seemed surprised but again, not upset by that information. “Anything else?” he wondered.

Yes, I also had details about his truck purchase, his grocery preferences, and his streaming choices, but I decided to keep all that to myself. “Not really. Do you want to know anything about me?”

He considered for a moment. “I’m not sure where to start my questions.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, bristling.

“It means, I thought about you over the years, but I didn’t picture you like this.” His eyes skimmed over me. “I imagined you in some crazy place getting the details of a story, interviewing people and finding the truth so you could let everyone know.”

“That is what I do, that’s my current job,” I told him. “I get the truth. I’m just not running off to different places to find it.”

“No, you’re naked on your lawn.”

“I was wearing underpants,” I told him coldly. “Also, a coat.”

“It was fifteen degrees,” he noted. “Underwear and a coat—”

“I was only going to the curb,” I said, just as coldly. Then I relented, because he was correct and I had been dumb. “I got your note.” He’d put it on my door sometime just after the accident, offering help if I needed it. “Thanks for coming by. I was recuperating at Nicola’s house. She made me stay with her, and she made Brenna give back the twenty bucks I’d used to pay her off at the hospital.”

“You got your hush money returned.” Danny laughed and I felt a sudden jolt of memory. He’d always laughed so quietly, kind of hiding his amusement. It was like he’d heard something that wasn’t quite appropriate and knew he shouldn’t find it funny, but he really did. “That all sounds very familiar to me,” he said. “Those are exactly the things that you guys were up to when I knew you, way back when.”

“We’re different, though,” I said. “A lot of time has passed. Nicola went through a rough patch where she was very unhappy. Addie was dating a huge, huge jerk for a while.”

“Brenna hasn’t changed much.”

“No, and Juliet still acts like she’s winning a race.”

“And that still bothers you?”

“Not at all,” I answered quickly. “How have you changed?”

He thought, because it wasn’t like him to speak without considering first. “Besides physically, I think I’m also mentally tougher. I used to let too much get to me, but not anymore.”

“I don’t remember you being that way.” The Danny of my memory had been stoic, for the most part.

“Maybe you just didn’t notice.” He stood up. “It was good to talk to you, but I need to get going.”

“I’m not doing anything today,” I announced, although I’d had a few plans. Mostly I was supposed to be working on the problem of digging up more dirt on the Horner husband, but I decided that could wait. “Can I come with you? I’d like to see your dad’s old place.”

He thought again. “You need to wear regular shoes and clothes. No high heels, no fancy dress.”

“I have regular clothes,” I said, and wondered if there was anything actually in my drawers or if I could find something partly decent on the floor of the laundry area of my basement. “I’ll meet you back here in five minutes.”

It was a little chilly in this cocktail attire, I mentally agreed. The jeans and sweatshirt I picked up in the basement, along with the coat that I usually wore for garbage removal, would be much better. I also would do better in hiking boots rather than the kitten heels that had belonged to my mom or the rubber slides, which I didn’t want to put on my feet ever again. It took me less than five minutes to change and I was out in the road before Danny made it to his truck. He was also wearing jeans and a coat, and big boots with heavy soles that made him look even taller. He carried some flattened boxes and a roll of tape which he put into the back seat of the truck, and I hopped into the front.

“I don’t remember ever driving you around before,” he mentioned as he backed out and we started off. He waved to another neighbor who passed by us.

“No, I don’t think you ever did. You never had anything to drive.” My grandfather had given me and my siblings a car to share, and I still had scars from fighting over it with Nicola and Addie. When Patrick and Juliet had turned sixteen, my mom had insisted to my dad that they had to buy another car for the twins to use. It was because of Patrick, of course. He had always gotten anything he ever wanted and for the most part, Juliet had, too.

“Your sister taught me how to drive,” he mentioned next, and it was true that Nicola had taught everybody, although she’d struggled the most with Grace. That girl was still a menace on the roads. “Tell me more about your family. I thought about them a lot over the years.”

There was always plenty to tell. I talked about the latest Patrick mess. He’d broken up with his long-term girlfriend (Liv, our former neighbor) and then she’d married someone else, and now he’d managed to create a baby with another woman (not a girlfriend). Apparently, my brother was going to be the primary caregiver of the child that was due…I thought. Soon. The baby would be here soon.

“How is that going to work?” Danny asked skeptically. “I remember him and the goldfish.”

“Right? Exactly,” I answered, because Nicola, Addie, and I were in total agreement about my brother’s lack of abilities as a caregiver. He’d killed his fish through inattention, and since then, he’d shown no indication that he’d transformed into a person who could have a pet, let alone a child. You had to be totally unselfish and simultaneously self-sacrificing. You had to give up all future pleasure and enjoyment and devote yourself entirely to your baby, that was what I’d noticed. I had no idea, none, why Nicola was so happily jumping into that misadventure.

Danny was asking me more about the baby’s mom, and I told him what I knew (which consisted of things I’d researched, not heard from my brother). My own mom was the only person keeping up with Patrick these days, because he was even ignoring his twin, Juliet. Mom wasn’t one to share if she thought the information made Patrick look bad, so she’d been very tight-lipped as of late. But he and his kid were due to come home soon and the whole situation was going to be a huge mistake. At least that wasn’t my circus.

I remembered Danny’s old house as being miles and miles away, so it surprised me how quickly he pulled over and stopped in front of a high, chain-link barrier backed by plywood. I had also remembered this fence as being at least fifteen feet high and scary, but it just looked normal. It was dirty and broken in a few places, but it wasn’t the fortress wall of my memory.

What was behind it, though, was much worse than the mess that I had pictured in my mind. “Oh, holy Mary,” I breathed when Danny unlocked and opened the gate.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s bad.”

It wasn’t just bad; it was overwhelming. I wasn’t too worried about neatness, myself, but this was like walking into a garbage bag. Huge hulks of rusty metal covered the property and there was also trash everywhere, like piles of beer cans as tall as I was, sodden stacks of cardboard, and mounds of faded plastic. That was all interspersed with mud and puddles, and the whole thing seemed impenetrable.

“I made a path to the house,” he said, and I followed carefully. I’d heard too much from my big sister about tetanus and waterborne diseases not to watch myself. We wended through the junk and although I’d also remembered this lot as huge, it didn’t take long to come upon a building. It was also in worse shape than I remembered, actually leaning at least ten degrees off center.

“I propped it up,” he told me. “I wouldn’t let you come in if it wasn’t safe.”

I knew that was true because he had always been cautious, especially with the safety and the feelings of others. He unlocked the door and we went into the tilted shack. He flicked on a light and the presence of electricity here surprised me, but what was inside surprised me more. Because it was…fine.

“I cleaned up,” he answered, when I looked at him questioningly. “It took me a while to start, but I’ve been coming over here on weekends and after work sometimes to get things done.”

I had never entered Danny’s house in the past, not once, but I’d imagined that the interior mimicked the chaotic despair that lay outside its walls. But now? It looked very livable. It was cleaner than some people’s houses, for sure, but again—dirt didn’t really bother me. “It’s fine,” I said aloud.

“Sure, except for the lack of insulation, the DIY roof, and the tilt.” He looked around. “It was full of shit just like the yard when I first got back. Look.” He moved toward a kitchen that seemed pretty makeshift, with a lot of the same appliances we’d used when our grandpa had taken us camping. We’d only gone once, because first it had rained the whole time, and then Grace had found snakes and wanted to keep them as pets. We’d discovered her collection only because Brenna had gotten mad at her and thrown her sleeping bag from the tent, and four or five reptiles had slithered out into the muck. No one had wanted to camp after that.

Anyway, this kitchen did look subpar for a house, and when Danny opened the door next to the sink basin with the pump above it…

“Sugar,” I stated. It was a mess inside that room, pure mess, this time of papers stacked in giant mounds, piles of food wrappers and trash, and heaps of what appeared to be rags but may have been items of clothing. I also saw a pillow and blanket in the middle of it all. “Was this your dad’s bedroom?”

“I think he was sleeping in here,” Danny agreed. “The whole house was like this before. It’s not just trash, either. He had mementos, papers that I need like my social security card and birth certificate, historical shit from our family. It’s all jumbled up together with pizza boxes and potato chip bags.”

“So you’re going through it and putting it in boxes? I’ve seen your garage,” I said. “It’s very well organized.”

“Those boxes are papers and stuff that seems like it could be valuable—” He stopped abruptly. “Did you hear that?”

I listened but only picked up on some faint traffic noise far in the distance. “What?”

“I think I sound like him. I’m keeping things because they might be worth something,” he answered. “That’s how he started, too.” He frowned and nudged a pile of papers with his boot. It tipped and fell, spewing more dust around the room.

“That’s how he started hoarding?” I asked. “Because he thought all this might be valuable someday?”

“He always called it his treasure,” Danny said. He frowned. “It was a firetrap.”

“I can’t imagine that he had a kid here.” Not that I liked kids too much, but I wasn’t cruel or anything, and I wasn’t a total idiot. I thought that his dad must have been one himself, though, since he’d chosen to raise a child in this situation.

“It wasn’t always this bad. That’s what I mean,” he answered. “It didn’t start like this. He was trying—” But he stopped again. “I packed some stuff earlier,” he continued after a moment. “I don’t want to do any more in here today. I’ll grab it and we can go.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, and I followed him into another room that was mostly clean, with just a few piles left and some of those neatly taped boxes. There were posters on the walls, a baseball player in one and the other featuring a local band I knew very well. It was a group that Danny and I had gone to see in our senior year of high school.

“Hey!” I said, pointing at the picture of the four guys. They hung by their fingertips from the Chestnut Street Bridge over the Dequindre Cut, back when it used to be just railroad tracks. “Was this your room?”

“Yeah,” he answered, and grabbed a box. “When I was here, it was empty except for my things. When I left, it gradually filled.” He walked out and I took a box myself and followed him on the path through the hulking junk and back to the truck. We loaded it with what he’d packed before, and I offered to help him go through more of the stuff inside but he said no.

“I have plans tonight, anyway,” he said. “I should go home and change.”

Oh. “Ok,” I agreed, and got back into the passenger side. It was fun to ride in his truck, up so much higher than the little car that I drove. It had been a while since I’d driven it, though, and on the last occasion that I’d opened my old garage at the back of my yard, the car had looked worse for wear. In contrast, Danny’s was very clean, with no dust or even spots on the windshield, and no wrappers, receipts, or empty mint containers on the floor. I wiped off my hands on my jeans and absently sang along to the radio when a good song came on, but we didn’t talk too much on the way back to our street.

I helped unload the boxes, too, stacking them in a column that was even with the others. I saw that they were carefully labeled: “Vintage cookbooks,” “Sports trophies,” “Yarn,” “Old magazines,” and “Cast iron.” Just tons of stuff, I thought, but there was so much more at the tilted shack.

“Thanks for your help,” he told me.

“You’re welcome.” That was his way of ushering me home, but I still stood there for a moment. “It’s so strange that you moved onto my street.”

“It was stranger that I found you like that in the snow. I’m glad you didn’t get hurt too badly.” He looked past me at a red car that was slowing as it approached. “She’s really early.”

“What?” I also turned and watched a BMW pull up behind his truck. “Who is that?”

Danny didn’t answer because he was walking towards the nice car. “Hi,” he said to the driver, a woman who looked to be around Juliet’s age. Younger, in other words. “I didn’t expect you so soon.”

“We finished fast,” she said, smiling up at him. Then she turned to me and looked slightly expectant, but mostly hostile.

“I’m Sophie,” I said. “I live over there.”

“Oh, in the pink house? That was a bold choice,” she answered, and I noticed that A, she hadn’t introduced herself back, and B, her tone had sounded exactly like Brenna’s when she talked about the color I’d picked for the old stucco. Like it hurt their eyes to see it.

“I’m lucky. Not every woman has the balls to live life as she choses,” I mentioned. “See you, Danny.”

“Doesn’t she know that you prefer Daniel?” I heard the woman ask as I walked back across the street.

I went immediately to my computer and started to research, but I moved to the window when I heard a car start. I watched them leave together in her BMW and late that night, I heard them return, too. And both their vehicles sat in the driveway, the red one behind the truck, until the next morning.