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The lane is empty and the orchard is bright with morning, every branch edged in melting frost. I come around the last bend and the farmhouse appears, white and sagging, with the barn standing off to one side. Across the big double doors, in red paint, in letters as tall as I am, someone has written something I read once and don't need to read again.

Then I see the porch. Glass glitters across the steps like spilled sugar.

Beyond the edge of it, on the lawn, in her own sweater and bare feet, with her arms crossed over her chest and her hair still tangled from my hands, stands Carolina.

She watches the cruiser stop. She watches me get out. Her eyes go to the badge on my chest, then to my face. Every bit of the warmth I left in her bed goes cold behind them.

Chapter 3 — Carolina

He's wearing a badge, and I'd like to know how something that size failed to come up in a cider line.

It sits on the left side of his chest, polished and exact in the morning light. I have precisely as long as it takes him to shut the cruiser door to arrange my face.

Between us the porch steps are covered in glass. It has gone out in a wide fan across the boards and down onto the gravel. The old brass lantern that hung over the door dangles from one chain with its bulb gone. The second light, the one that was never on last night, is just a socket now. Its shade lies in three pieces by the rail.

The sun is coming up the hill behind him and catching every splinter.

"Don't move," he calls. "Carolina, there's glass."

"I know there's glass. I've been looking at it for twenty minutes."

"Are you hurt?"

"My feet are fine. I went out the side door and came around." I keep my arms crossed high over my sweater, the one from last night with leggings I pulled on in the dark. "I didn't know whether to sweep it or leave it for evidence."

"Leave it."

He's crossing the lawn toward me with his boots crunching on the thawing grass. His face is the thing I can't stop reading. I have seen that mouth do a dozen things since yesterday. It does none of them now. The grin is gone and so is the slow sideways tilt of his head. He just looks at me, taking in my hair, my bare feet, my hands, with a flat attention I would call professional if I hadn't had it on me in a bed six hours ago.

"When did you find it?"

"Seven. I was coming down to put the kettle on and there was a crack from out front, and then a second one. I stood at the top of the stairs for a while."

"A while."

"I had Nell's skillet." I tip my head toward the front hall, where a cast iron pan the size of a hubcap sits on the bottom stair. "I checked every room."

"The skillet's a good call."

"It's the only thing in the house I could lift with one hand and still mean it." I lift my chin. "You have a badge."

"I do."

"You told me you worked for the county."

"I do work for the county. This is the county."

"You said you stood around looking good."

"That's about sixty percent of it."

"Don't."

His eyes close for about a second. When they open they're serious in a way that does something uncomfortable to my stomach.

"You're right. I'll explain, and you can say whatever you want to me, I promise. But I need to do my job first. Can I look at the house?"

"Is that a request or a procedure?"