He bent down and eased the bra out of Moose's mouth without making a thing of it, held it loosely at his side like a man who handled women's underwear in his yard every Tuesday and couldn't be bothered. Moose leaned against his calf.
"Astrid Matthews," Easton said.
It wasn't a question.
"Hi."
He let his eyes go up and down me once, fast, and then he made the kind of decision a man makes for you when he can see you can't make it for yourself.
"Come inside."
I shook my head.
"I'm fine. I'll just grab him."
He didn't move out of the doorway. He just looked at me, one hand still loose at his hip, weighing me the way you'd weigh a problem you already knew the answer to.
"You're barefoot. You're wet. There's grass on the back of your legs."
The grass part was new information. I felt the cold print of it through the bath towel.
"I'll walk fast."
"Astrid." He pushed off the doorframe. The sun caught him fully on the shoulders for one second on his way out of the shade, and then he was on the patio with me. "Unless you're planning on giving the whole street a show on the way home, come inside. I'll find you a shirt."
I stood on his lawn in a slipping towel with my bra in his hand and weighed dying of mortification on the spot against dying of mortification in his kitchen. I decided the hair towel was a clothed person's problem.
The kitchen was, marginally, more dignified.
I came up to the patio.
He stepped aside to let me in, and I felt him not look at me as I passed. I'd lived with a man for six years who'd always looked, who'd looked the way you check on a possession, and it took me a second to register that Easton Ford was keeping his eyes on the doorframe on purpose. Polite. Careful. A different category of man than I had spent six years calibrating around.
"Bathroom's first door on the left," he said. "Hang on."
He disappeared down a hall.
I stood in his kitchen.
The kitchen of a woman who had been dead for a year. Recipe cards in a tin on the counter. A half-finished mug of coffee. A golden retriever lying on a braided rug, who lifted her head, blinked at me, and put it back down without commentary, as if women in towels were a regular Tuesday for her, too.
That had to be Penny. Mrs. Ford's Penny. Older now, white at the muzzle.
Moose padded over to her and lay down with his chin on his paws six inches from her face. She huffed once and let him.
How often had these two done this?
Easton came back with a T-shirt folded in one hand and my bra in the other. He held them both out to me without looking at either of them.
"Here."
The T-shirt was gray, Hartsdale Fire on the front, soft from a hundred washes. I took it. I took the bra. He looked at the cabinet over my head.
"Holler if you need anything."
"Thank you."
"Down the hall on the left."
