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"After that."

"That you didn't laugh at me."

"I laughed."

"At the right time. Not the polite time."

She's quiet. Her fingers move absently over my ribs. I'm still trying to work out why something that simple feels so much like a confession when her breathing slows and deepens.

I turn off the lamp with my free hand. In the dark, I lie there listening to a woman I met five hours ago sleep on my chest.

I think, calmly, that I'm going to close my eyes for a minute.

The house wakes me. A tick in the walls, a settling beam, a faint pale square of window where the moon is setting. My phone buzzes once on the floor in my jeans, the way it does up here when the signal finally lets a late message through.

I'm out of bed and across the room before I've fully decided to be, sliding it out of my pocket and covering the screen with my hand.

5:12. A text from my mother, sent at 9:58 last night.

Out like a light by eight. She asked if you won the pumpkin guess. I told her you'd lost on purpose. Be good.

Under it is a photo. Faith on her side in Ruth's guest bed, mouth open, one arm hooked around a stuffed fox she's had since she was two, a purple blanket tangled around her feet. Her hair is a mess.

I look at it for longer than I mean to, thumb on the corner of the screen. The whole warm, loose feeling in my body tightens into something I recognize.

Rules. Out before light, no number, no breakfast, nobody sees me. I've kept every one for five years. I've never once had a night I wanted to extend.

I dress in the moonlight, quietly. Jeans, T-shirt, flannel, boots in my hand. Carolina sleeps on her side with one arm stretched across my empty pillow and the quilt pushed down to her hip. The moonlight finds the curve of her shoulder, the long line of her back, and the freckles there. Her hair has fallen across half her face and moves slightly with each breath.

I stand at the foot of the bed with my boots in one hand and stay longer than I should.

There's a pen on the nightstand and a pad with Nell's name printed at the top. I pick up the pen. I put it down.

I pick up the photograph instead and set it right side up on the dresser. Sorry, Nell. Don't tell her I said so.

When I bend to kiss her shoulder, she stirs. "Ethan?" Her voice is rough and soft, her eyes not fully open.

"Go back to sleep."

"'S it seven?"

"Not yet."

"Lock the door," she mumbles. Her hand finds mine on the quilt, squeezes once, and falls slack.

I stand there until her breathing evens out. Then I take my boots and step into the hall.

At the third stair from the top, the board gives a long, loud complaint. I stop with my heart in my throat. She doesn't wake.

Honest. She wasn't kidding.

At the front door I pause. The deadbolt needs a key I don't have, so I press the button in the knob, pull the door shut behind me, and test it twice. It holds.

It's not enough, and I know it isn't.

The cold is a slap. Frost has whitened the grass. The orchard rows stretch down the hill in the last of the moonlight with their branches furred silver. My boots print dark tracks through the white as I go down the third row, past the old Northern Spy. Two paper cups still sit on a stump with a skin of ice across the cider.

I look at them for a second. Then I pick them up and put them in my jacket pocket, because Nell caught me stealing apples once and told me to do things properly.