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Quiet for a while. Someone's car door goes down the drive.

"Say it," Lila says. "Whatever it's going to be. I'd rather have it now."

"Saving my life doesn't erase what you did." Maren's voice doesn't shake. "But it means there's something left to decide what to do with. And, thank you."

"When?"

"I don't know. But, not soon."

Lila nods, small, the way you nod when the number they call is yours.

She stands up and walks down the drive past nineteen wolves, and not one of them moves, because I don't tell them to. I could have. Two weeks ago I'd have wanted to.

I go looking for the wanting-to and it isn't in me anywhere, and that one I can't blame on my wolf.

Maren stands in the driveway a long time after the taillights are gone.

"I didn't touch her," she says. To the gravel. Not to me.

I don't tell her that's true. She knows it's true. It isn't the part that's going to have her sitting up at three in the morning twenty years from now.

I take her hand.

The truck smells like woodsmoke and burned wax. Sid rides the dash with his tail curled over his feet like he paid for the seat.

Town goes by dark. Pumpkins gone soft on the porches. One inflatable ghost tipped over in a yard, still lit, still humming.

She will tell you it was nothing. His voice is not a cat's anymore and I don't think I'll get used to it if I live to ninety. It was not nothing.

"I know what it was."

Maren looks over. "What?"

"Annoying cat."

I park in my own driveway at twenty past two and neither of us gets out.

There's a line running between us that I can't put down, and it doesn't only go her way. She's been sitting next to me for forty minutes with the whole inside of me lying open like a drawer pulled all the way out.

Thirty-eight years of keeping everything inside, and now the one person who could take the floor out from under me can hear me think about her.

"You heard me think it," I say.

"Since the floor." She doesn't pretend not to know what I mean. "Two hours ago."

"And you didn't say anything."

"It's not mine to say." She turns in the seat.

Out past the hood, my mailbox leans eleven degrees off true. It's been that way since the second week of April. I've had a level in my hand a hundred times.

"You backed a rental truck into that mailbox."

"That mailbox was in the street."

"It was in my yard."

"It was practically in the street, and you came out of that house like you were going to eat the truck with me inside it."