"Yes."
"Rogue. We talked on the phone."
His hand comes down to me from the top of the porch step.
I have to look up at him to take it.
His hand is the size of a dinner plate, and his grip is the kind that could break my fingers without effort and chooses not to.
I feel calluses on his palm and the heat of his skin and the brief, deliberate pressure of his hold before he lets go.
"Nice to meet you," I say.
My voice doesn’t shake, which is surprising. I’m more nervous than a chihuahua in a thunderstorm.
"Come on up," he says, and steps back to let me onto the porch. "Got iced tea inside if you want it."
I climb the steps.
He holds the screen door for me with one hand and I have to duck under his arm to get past, and for half a second I’m close enough to him to smell what he smells like—soap, sun, and a faint hint of leather and something else I can’t name—and then I’m inside the clubhouse and he’s letting the screen door close behind me.
It is so much cooler inside.
A ceiling fan turns slowly above a long cypress table. Twelve chairs around it. A bar at the back wall. A stone fireplace, cold this time of year.
A single shotgun mounted above the bar that I would put money on being functional.
There is nobody else in the room.
I’m alone with him.
He walks past me to the bar without looking back, and I stand at the head of the table with my purse clutched against my stomach, telling myself to loosen up and breathe.
"Sit anywhere," he says.
I sit.
I take the chair closest to the door because Nash is in the U-Haul outside. I sit with my back to the wall, and I don’t let my hands shake.
He brings two mason jars of iced tea over and sets one in front of me, pulls out the chair at the head of the table—not across from me, the head—and sits down.
He takes off the hat, sets it on the table beside his glass.
His hair is the same auburn as his beard, cropped close to his skull.
He drinks his tea and looks at me over the rim of the glass.
I look back.
"Your boy all right in that truck?" he says.
I had not expected that to be his first question.
"He's asleep. I left it running with the AC on."
"How old?"
"Six."