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"I'm going to stand here for about a minute and not do anything."

"Do I get a vote?"

"You get all the votes."

"Then good night, Ethan."

He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses the knuckles, once, slowly, his beard rough against my skin. Then he lets it go.

I step inside and close the door and lean against it with my eyes shut and my heart going like a drum. I listen to his footsteps cross the hall. A door opens and shuts at the far end, the one beyond the bathroom. The wall behind the bed is shared with his.

I get under the good quilt. It smells of cedar and lavender and clean cotton. I lie on my back and listen to the house settle, and to the faint sounds of a man on the other side of a wall moving around his room. A drawer. A floorboard. A long slow sigh.

I put my palm flat against the wall beside the bed. It's warm, or I imagine it is.

I lie there for a long time with my eyes open. I do not think either of us sleeps.

Chapter 6 — Ethan

The wall between my bedroom and the spare room is thinner than I'd always believed.

I know that now. I know the creak of the bed frame when a woman turns onto her left side, and the particular silence of someone lying awake with her eyes on the ceiling. I know the sound of one long sigh, followed by the thump of a pillow being punched into a better shape. At four in the morning I lay with one arm behind my head and the other flat on my stomach and counted the minutes between her movements. At five I gave up and counted the cracks in my own ceiling instead.

By seven I'm in the kitchen with my second cup of coffee. She comes in wearing jeans and a green sweater, with her hair pinned up in a clip and the slightly bruised look under her eyes of someone who has not slept either. She stops in the doorway. We look at each other. A whole conversation goes by in silence, most of it about the staircase.

"Morning," I say.

"Morning."

"You look rested."

"I look like I've been hit by a bus, and you know it." She crosses to the coffee pot, pours herself a mug, and takes a long swallow with her back to me. "You do too."

"I always look like this."

"You looked better yesterday."

"Yesterday I was being charming."

"Don't start."

But the corner of her mouth has moved. When she turns around she's leaning against the counter with the mug held in both hands and her eyes on my face. There's a faint pink flush along her cheekbones that has nothing to do with the coffee.

"I'm not going to pretend I didn't hear you walking around."

"I wasn't walking around."

"You opened a drawer."

"I was looking for socks."

"At four in the morning."

"They were very important socks."

She hides her smile in the mug. I'm still trying to think of a better lie when the stairs thunder. Faith comes into the kitchen at a dead run in her pajamas, with her hair in a wild cloud and her fox under one arm. She stops dead in the middle of the floor. She looks at Carolina. Her whole face lights up.

"You're still here."