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"Is she there?"

"She's here."

"I'll leave you to it," Kieran says, and the line goes dead.

I put the phone down on the nightstand. The room is quiet. A curtain moves in the window. A square of afternoon sun lies across the foot of the bed.

"So that's that," Carolina says.

"That's that."

The reason she's in my house ended eleven seconds ago. Neither of us says so.

Chapter 7 — Carolina

Kieran has been kind to me twice in two days. Turns out that's the worst kind of kindness.

I heard every word. The room was quiet, Ethan held the phone loosely, and Kieran has the kind of voice that carries even when he's trying to keep it down. She can go home tonight if she wants. The sun is still lying across the foot of the bed, warm on my ankles. The sheet is still warm where I'm holding it against my chest. Nothing has changed, except that I now know exactly how long it would take me to pack.

"That was Kieran," Ethan says.

"I heard."

"Dale Pruitt. I've known him since high school. He fixed my mother's roof."

"Did he do a good job?"

"Terrible. It leaks over the pantry."

I laugh. It's funny and I need to. He looks at me with such relief that something in my ribs pulls tight.

I get out of the bed. It's strange to walk across the floor naked in daylight in a man's bedroom, picking my clothes up one piece at a time from the chair and the rug. I do it without hurrying. I can feel him watching. In the little mirror over his dresser I catch a flash of my own shoulders, flushed and freckled. A mark just under my left ear the size of a thumbprint where his beard has been. I look at it for a second longer than I mean to. Then I pull the green sweater on over my head.

"You don't have to go tonight," he says.

"I know I don't."

"The locks aren't fixed."

"Kieran says I'm safe."

"Kieran says a lot of things." He's sitting on the edge of the bed in his jeans, with his forearms on his knees and his hands hanging between them. He looks up at me. He looks like a man who is about to say something and has not worked out the first word. "Stay for supper, at least. Mom'll bring Faith back at six. She'll want to hear about the barn."

"I'd like that."

"Yeah?"

"Yes." I smooth the sweater down over my hips. "Is there anything I can do?"

"You could find me a shirt."

I find him a shirt. It's the gray flannel from last night, draped over the chair. I hold it out. He takes it. Our fingers touch. Neither of us says anything about it.

The afternoon passes in a strange way. We go downstairs. He makes a pot of coffee and then doesn't drink it. I sit at the kitchen table with Nell's mail, which I brought from the farmhouse in a shoebox. I sort it into piles without reading any of it. He folds a load of laundry on the living room couch, small shirts and a pair of socks with foxes on them. I hear him smoothing each one flat.

At some point I get down on my hands and knees to look under the couch. I come up with a yellow rain boot, scuffed at the toe, with a dried leaf stuck inside it. I carry it to the front hall and set it on the bench next to its partner.

For a minute I stand there looking at the two of them, side by side.