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And they both heard it. It sat in the room the way it had sat on a porch in July, and it wasn’t funny, because she’d stood at a door two weeks ago and used the real version, and they both knew that, and looked at each other across a fire, and she put her hand over her mouth.

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t. Can we.”

“No.” He put the chair leg down. “It was a good line.”

“It was a terrible line. It was the worst line either of us ever said and we said it forty times.” She was laughing behind her hand. “I said it into your shoulder at the barbecue with a hundred people looking.” She took her hand down. “And then I said the real one, at your door, and it wasn’t a joke, and now the joke’s not funny anymore. It’s got the real one in it.”

“So it’s done.”

“It’s done.” She looked at him. “Say something. Bury it. You’re the one who talks.”

He thought about it.

“I don’t like you,” he said. “I love you. I never once liked you, not from the first night, I went straight past it. That’s the last time. It’s retired. Anybody says it in this house again has to fix the roof.”

“That’s Chase, then.”

“That’s Chase,” he agreed, and she laughed till she had to lie back down. When she’d done, she got up.

She got up in his shirt and nothing else and Remi’s boots, because the floor was cold, and she took the thermos off the hearth and poured two cups of Chase’s coffee, which was terrible, and gave him one, and went to look at the house.

He watched her do it. He sat on the hearth with the cup and watched a woman in his shirt walk the rooms of a house he’d bought on a Friday, coffee in her hand, hair down her back. Into the kitchen, where there was no stove. Out again. Into the room off the hall that had been a bedroom once and was where the tarp let the light in now, and she stood in the middle of it and looked up.

“This one,” she said, from the doorway.

“For what?”

“The bed. It faces south. You’ll want to see your fence from it, and the sun’ll come in the window in the morning and not the evening, and you won’t have to put a curtain up.” She came back down the hall. “The kitchen wants a window over the sink. There isn’t one. Whoever built this house never washed a dish in his life.”

“Ed Hardwick’s wife washed the dishes.”

“Then she did it looking at a wall, and I’m not going to.” She stood in front of him with the cup. “I want a window over the sink and I want the table where I can see the door and I want a hook by the door for a chart, and you can have the rest.”

“The rest?”

“The roof. The pens. The fence. The bit with the cows on.” She drank the terrible coffee and made a face at it. “I don’t care about any of that. I care about the sink.”

He looked up at her. In his shirt, in a house with a hole in it, she’d put a bed in a room and a window in a wall and a hook by a door in about four minutes, with a cup of Chase’s coffee in her hand, and she’d never once in her life put a thing in a drawer.

“You’ve picked where the bed goes,” he said.

“Somebody had to. Say something about it. I can see you want to.”

“I don’t want to say anything about it.” He put the cup down. “I want to sit here and watch you do it a while longer. Go pick where the chairs go.”

“There’s one chair and you burned it.”

“Then pick where it would’ve gone,” he said. She looked at him a long moment over the cup. Then she put it down and came and sat on the hearth beside him and put her head on his shoulder, and didn’t pick anything, and they sat there in the light in front of a fire in a house with no roof, and they were still sitting there when Chase’s truck came over the cattle guard at ten to nine with a ladder on it.

Chase stood in the yard with the ladder on his shoulder and looked at the two of them on the porch step, him in his jeans and her in his shirt and Remi’s boots with a pie plate on her knees, and put the ladder down.

“Morning, Sunny.”

“Morning, Chase.”