I put the dogs in the back. Penny on the quilt. Moose curled in beside her. Then I went around to the passenger side and stopped before I opened the door.
"You're not getting in my truck like that."
She looked up.
"What?"
"You're soaked through. Hartsdale's twenty minutes. By the time we hit Maple, you're going to be hypothermic. Change."
"I'll change at home."
"You'll change here."
"Easton."
"I'm not driving you home in wet clothes. I've seen the back end of it on shift. People talk themselves intoI'm fineall the way up to the part where they aren't anymore."
"I don't have anything to change into."
I turned, walked to the toolbox in the bed, and popped the lid. I'd kept a change of clothes in there for two years, ever since a structure fire in February put me in soaked-through gear at the end of a sixteen-hour shift and I drove home in it. Never made that mistake twice. I pulled out the bundle. Sweatpants. A thermal. A clean T-shirt. A pair of cotton socks rolled the way my grandmother taught me.
I handed it to her.
She looked at the bundle. She looked at me.
"Are you serious?"
"I'm serious. Take the cab. I'll stay out here. Dogs need water."
"Easton."
"Astrid. Take it."
She took it.
I shut her door behind her. I walked around to the front of the truck, put my back to the windshield, and looked at the trees.
The dogs got water out of the gallon jug I kept in the bed. Penny drank slowly. Moose drank like he'd been on the trail for a week. I scratched their ears and ignored what was happening behind me.
She knocked on the windshield.
I turned around.
She was in my sweatpants rolled twice at the ankle, the cuffs of my thermal pulled down past her thumbs, her hair half-dry on one side. The fleece I'd given her at the bank was folded on the seat beside her.
She rolled the window down.
"Thanks."
"Yeah."
"For the clothes."
"Anytime."
She let a beat go by.
"That's not a thing you should say lightly to a woman who's already made off with your T-shirt."
