We went around the side of the house. Penny was already on the porch like she'd been waiting for us, with Moose worrying the latch of the back gate from the inside. Easton let him into the yard, and the two of them went straight for the rose bed.
"Pen's not allowed in the roses," he said, settling on the top step beside me.
"Moose isn't either."
"Moose doesn't know that."
"Moose knows. Moose doesn't care."
He huffed something close to a laugh and took the coffee I held out. Our shoulders weren't touching, but they weren't not touching, either. The morning had that particular cold that comes off the river before the sun's high enough to do anything about it, and his thigh was warm against my knee where my leg had ended up.
I should've moved my leg.
I didn't move my leg.
He drank his coffee. I drank mine. Penny put her chin on his bare foot. Moose came over and dropped a bee-stung paw in my lap with the wounded dignity of a dog who'd been warned and had not, in fact, listened.
"Told you," Easton said.
"He doesn't listen."
"None of us do."
He said it while looking at the dogs. He could have been talking about any of us. I didn't ask which.
We sat there until the coffees went cold.
My fifteen-year-old self would have been completely undone.
That was the thought that caught me one morning, coffee in both hands, watching Moose steer Penny away from the garden bed she was too old to jump and too stubborn to go around. Fifteen-year-old Astrid Matthews had spent three summers watching Easton Ford come and go from that bungalow and had never once gotten close enough to speak to him.
She also would have died if she'd known how it started. Three summers of watching from a safe distance, and the thing that finally got me across the street was a bath towel and a dog with her bra in his mouth.
I would have needed to break it to her gently.
I'd spent the afternoon at the kitchen table with the permits.
The lease was signed. The DEA registration went through. The contractor walked the space on Tuesday and sent over a quote by Wednesday: exam tables, surgical lights, and the autoclave. The building inspector had a date on the calendar two weeks out. I was working through the supply order one line at a time because someone had to, and I was the only someone there was.
The kettle had been on long enough that the water stopped sounding interested. I got up to turn the burner off.
That was when I heard the knock.
It was softer than Brett's. My body knew it before my head did. I was standing at the stove with my hand still on the knob, shoulders up around my ears, and I had to remind myself I was in Hartsdale and I hadn't answered a door for Brett in eight months.
I crossed the hallway, made myself uncurl my shoulders before I touched the door, and looked through the peephole.
The man on my porch was in his late sixties. Silver hair. Fleece vest. Khakis. Hands clasped at the front of his waist. No car at the curb. He must've walked here. He looked like everyone's grandfather, which I noted with the part of my brain that had spent six years learning to read men who wanted something while looking like they didn't.
I opened the door.
"Astrid?"
"Yes."
"Joe Caldwell. From the practice on Elm."
I knew the name. I let a beat go by where I could have said so. I didn't.
