He chuckles. “Guilty. Are you always this efficient in a crisis?”
“Yes,” I say, because I am, and I don’t see any reason to apologize for it. “Make sure it’s fully out before you touch the grill again.” I pick up my coffee, which has gone lukewarm, and head for my door.
“I’ll be more careful,” he calls after me.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I call back, and I go inside before I can think too carefully about the fact that I’m almost smiling.
I do not google him.
I make a fresh cup of coffee, return to my deck, find my page, and read for a productive forty minutes before I go inside to make lunch.
I do not google him.
I eat my lunch, answer three emails I told myself I wasn’t going to answer, and start a new chapter.
I google him at 3:47 in the afternoon and I want it noted, for the record, that I held out admirably.
Cruz Jacksonpulls up results immediately— Instagram first, then YouTube, then a profile piece in some lifestyle publication I’ve never heard of. The number that catches my eye: 2.3 million Instagram followers. I click through without meaning to.
The feed is exactly what the grin suggested. Beach content, workout content, cooking-disaster content that is clearly deliberate, the kind of effortless aesthetic that takes a significant amount of effort to produce. He’s charming in that specific, calibrated way that reads well through a screen with an easy laugh, self-deprecating, quick.
I find the bio.
Cruz Jackson. Lifestyle. Architect. Living out loud on the coast. 34.
Thirty-four.
I do the math without wanting to. Fourteen years. He’s closer in age to my younger daughter than he is to me, which is a sentence I immediately regret constructing.
I close the tab.
I open it again, because I’m an attorney and I am thorough, and I scroll a little further, and there —posted twenty minutes ago— is a video of a grill fire that looks very familiar, captioned:the neighbor saved the day (and the salmon). 10/10 recommend having a hero next door.
The comments are already in the thousands.
I close the tab.
This time I leave it closed.
I go back to my deck and my book and my lukewarm coffee and I sit in my chair and I think about absolutely nothing except the words on the page in front of me, which is why I am here, alone, on purpose, with no interest whatsoever in my neighbors or their follower counts or the specific quality of their laugh.
The sun drops lower. The ocean does what the ocean does. In and out. In and out without thinking.
Somewhere around seven, I notice something on the shared railing.
A bottle of wine. Really good wine, I can tell from here. And a folded note tucked under the neck. I cross the deck without deciding to. Unfold the note with a suspicion I’m entirely right to have.
For the hero. A hazard says thank you.
It takes me longer than it should to stop almost-smiling.
I take the wine inside.
2
CRUZ
I saw her before she saw the fire.
