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"I may have overpaid."

"Dolores told me. Two hundred."

"She's a hard negotiator."

"You're a terrible one." I breathe in. "I decided."

He goes absolutely still.

"Walk me home," I say.

"Rosey—"

"I'm deciding in the direction of yes. Don't make me say it twice on a village green."

His mouth moves, that crooked unguarded thing, and he offers me his arm. I take it.

Linden Street is a ten-minute walk and we don't talk. It isn't that kind of silence. Behind us the fiddle fades, the bonfire shrinks to an orange smudge between the trees, and the lanterns on the Green dwindle to coins.

The streetlights come on in a long row. His arm is warm and solid under my hand, and every few steps our bodies bump, shoulder to shoulder, hip to thigh, and neither of us moves away.

A leaf lands in his hair. I pluck it out and don't give it back. By the time we reach my yellow door I'm gripping my keys so hard they've left a print in my palm.

The kitchen light is on its timer. The house is very quiet and I can hear the old clock above the stove, my mother's casserole dishes ticking faintly on their shelf, and from the sink, the thing I've stopped hearing, plink, a single drop into the basin.

Roman tilts his head.

"Cold side," he says. "It's the seat washer."

"Mae."

"Mae."

"I'm going to kill her."

"She said you'd say that." He's already turned toward the sink, slowly, like a man approaching a skittish horse. "May I?"

"I'm not having a man fix my faucet as some kind of prelude."

"It isn't a prelude." He looks at me over his shoulder and he isn't smiling now. "It's been dripping for two years and I'm not going to be able to hear anything else all night."

I laugh. It comes out of me, startled, and I put the back of my hand against my mouth. "There's a tackle box in the basement. My dad kept every washer in the county."

He's under the sink in ten minutes with the tackle box open on the linoleum and a flashlight clamped in his teeth. I lean against the counter with my arms around myself, still in the blue throw, and watch.

His shirt has ridden up at the back and there's a strip of skin above his belt that I look at for a great deal longer than any adult woman should. I watch his shoulders flex when he leans on the wrench.

Nobody's lain on that floor since my father. Nobody's asked me where the tackle box is, or told me which cabinet the shutoff was in, or said hand me that, no, the other one, thank you, Rosey in a voice that doesn't make me feel like a girl who failed to do it herself.

"There." He wriggles out, shuts the cabinet, and wipes his hands on his trousers. "Listen."

I listen.

The kitchen is so quiet it rings.

No plink. Just the clock and my own breathing and the cold hum of the refrigerator, and underneath it all the whole sleeping house, held in the sort of silence it hasn't had in two years. My eyes sting. I look at the ceiling. I make a noise that's supposed to be a laugh.

"Thank you."