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I know. Shit! What's wrong with me?

I hear her front door shut and I turn around to go back inside.

The thing over my counter has been facing the sink since six thirty last night. Every hour I've sat with it, every time I've come through, the sink.

It's facing the front door now.

31

MAREN

STILL FOUR DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

The first thing I do in my own house is look for a man who isn't in it.

Kitchen. Hallway. The bottom of the stairs, where he stands when he doesn't want to come any farther in.

Four days under his roof and my body already knows the shape of him in a doorway.

I stop in the middle of my own living room and make myself hold still.

The house is cold. Nobody has run water in it since Wednesday. There's a mug on the counter with a brown ring dried into the bottom.

The front door is new.

I keep my coat on and think through what I know.

His wolf chose me in April. I backed a rental truck into his mailbox, climbed out, and argued with a man the size of a grain silo about whose property that post was technically standing on.

He knew right then. He's known through every single conversation we've had since.

The pizza with the mushrooms picked off. The railing. The sanded boards at four in the morning. The twelve feet he measured and reported to me like a punch line.

I was in one conversation for six months. He was in a different one, and his had furniture in it that I never got to see.

Then there's the part I can’t stop thinking about.

I asked him one question. Would you still want me if nobody had told you to?

He had the answer. I could see it in his face, sitting on that bottom stair with his hands turned up where I could see them.

And he took two seconds too long to answer me.

At eleven I set a candle on the kitchen table and sit down across from it.

"Okay," I tell it.

Nothing.

I've ripped an iron gate off its hinges with my temper. I stopped a creature with teeth in the middle of Gage's kitchen on Saturday night and it hasn't moved since.

I stare at one unlit wick for eleven minutes.

Not a spark. Not the small pull behind my ribs I've started to know the feel of. It's like reaching into a pocket and finding nothing but lining.

Sid comes through the hallway wall at noon, the way a man walks into an office with his name on the door.

"You're supposed to be over there. He has salmon."