"I don't know what to say to that," I tell him, honestly.
"Most people don't." He doesn't seem bothered. "Most people say something anyway. You didn't. That's all right."
"Should I be—" I stop. I don't know how to finish it without it being rude.
"Scared?" he offers.
"I was going to find a nicer word."
"Don't bother on my account." He looks at me across the fire, and the light moves on his face, and there's something in his eyes that isn't hard, that's the opposite of hard, that's tired in a way I recognize because I see it in my own mirror. "You're sitting in your own yard with your own dog and a fence you can get back through in about four steps. You're fine."
And the thing is—I believe him. I don't know why I believe him.
My mother would have me up and inside with the deadbolt thrown. But I believe him, and I stay.
The fire ticks down. Hoagie sighs in his sleep and rolls so his spine is against the man's boot, shameless.
"What do you do?" the man asks. "Out here. When you're not feeding stray men your wine."
I take a slow sip so I don't have to answer right away.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to tell him. I'm a teacher. Second grade. I've got twenty-one kids in my class, twenty-two until last week.
The words sit right there. And right behind them sits the rest of it—the folder with my name on it, the screenshots that aren't real, the woman at the Piggly Wiggly weighing the word sister in her mouth—and I can't say the first part without the second part coming with it.
Not tonight. Not to the one person within a mile of me who looks at me and sees a woman with a dog, and not a story the town's already decided how to tell.
"This and that," I say.
He doesn't push. He just nods like that's a real answer, and turns his glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair, and lets it be.
I could kiss him for not pushing. I think that, exactly that, and then I have to look at the fire for a second.
We sit there while it burns down, not saying much, and it's the most peace I've had since Karen spoke to me earlier about the investigation.
The fire's gone to coals by the time he stands to leave.
"Thank you," I say. "For the dog. And for the—" I gesture vaguely at the dark, the chairs, the hour. "For not making me talk."
"Anytime." He says it like he means it, not like the word people use to end a conversation.
He ducks back through the gap into his own yard, Hoagie watching him go like he's losing a friend, and I gather up the glasses and head for my back door.
I'm halfway across the grass when it hits me, and I stop, and I almost laugh.
I never got his name.
I sat by a fire for an hour with a man who told me his whole family rides with a motorcycle club out of Tallahassee, and I never asked him his name.
I look back through the pines. His porch light's still on. The big shape of him is moving through it, and then the light goes out.
I go inside. I throw the deadbolt, the way my mother would want.
But I'm thinking about the man next door, his cut, and his crooked, scarred hands—and I'm not thinking about the folder with my name on it, not right now, not for the first time all day.
Maybe this new, hot neighbor is just the distraction I need.
CHAPTER FOUR