Page 17

For a while, neither of us moves. Her hair brushes my chest when she shifts closer, and I put an arm around her because it would be stranger not to.

After a minute or so, she rolls off the bed and finds her sweatshirt. The sleeves swallow her hands, and she rolls them twice without looking. She doesn't put her shorts back on.

"I'm parched. Do you mind if I grab some water?"

"Not at all. I'll get it for you."

"I'm good. I'm already up. Would you like a glass, too?"

"I'm good, thanks."

Her feet go across the terrazzo. A cabinet opens and closes, and then the tap turns on.

It ought to rub me wrong. Every plate and spoon and bent photograph in this house is Hildie's, and since she moved to Sabal Point, nobody but Rudy and me has touched any of it. There's a woman going through her kitchen in the dark right now, and I lie here in the tree light and let her.

She comes back with a glass of water in one hand, her phone pinched between her pointer and middle finger, and the jar off the windowsill in the other.

"You have a whole jar of teeth. That's insane."

"Sixty years of walking that beach, if you combine Hildie and me."

She sets her phone on the bedside table, sits down at the foot of the bed with the jar in her lap, and works the lid off. My eyes are drawn to her round thigh peeking out from the bottom hem of her sweatshirt.

She pours a handful into her palm, turning the little black and gray triangles over under the colored lights sneaking in from the tree. Then she puts them back one at a time.

"This was your room."

"Yeah."

"How can you tell?" I tip my head toward the wall over the dresser. "I took everything down the day I left. I was eighteen and, naturally, knew everything there was to know."

She climbs back onto the bed with her water and pulls the sweatshirt lower over her thighs.

"It just occurred to me that I don't even know how old you are."

"Twenty-nine."

Her eyebrows go up a little.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'm twenty-four. I guess I assumed we were the same age."

I look over at her. "And what does twenty-four-year-old Mackie do in Western North Carolina?"

"I run marketing for a bank. It's regional, headquartered in Holly Ridge, where I grew up. Mostly the same four thousand people, or their descendants, and one stoplight."

"Sounds crowded."

"It can be." She nudges my leg with her bare foot. "What about you? I keep calling you the cowboy, but what do you actually do?"

"That's not far off. I own a small ranch. Cattle, sheep, some hogs."

"Actual cowboy, then. Nailed it." She smiles over the rim of the water glass. "So you own a ranch. That's pretty hot."

"I bought it four years ago with everything I had saved. Wade works with me, and between the two of us, we keep it running."

"That's really cool. You said you moved out there at eighteen?"