I'd seen her under fluorescent lights with blood on her gloves and a trauma patient in front of her. This felt more intimate than those moments when her professional guard was up.
This was different. This was the most undefended face I'd ever looked at.
This was her private face, saved for when she thought no one was watching. I hadn't been invited to it. I had no claim to it.
Still, I sat in the shade of my garage with cooling coffee in my hands and watched her steal five quiet minutes before she headed to bed.
3
Sophia
It was four-eleven in the afternoon when the bikes came back, and the part of me that hears for a living was sitting up in bed before the part of me that thinks for a living had caught up to why.
Loud, multiple, a crew. Not the morning ride-by I’d half-clocked through sleep — that one had been a single throttle going somewhere on its own. This was four engines. Five. The throaty oncoming of a pack arriving at a destination, and the destination was twenty feet across the asphalt from my bedroom window.
Dread had arrived a beat ahead of the count. It had taken its position in my shoulders and the back of my neck and the floor of my stomach before the part of me that did the counting was ever invited to weigh in. It had been beating the count to the punch like that for years.
I sat up. My hand went to my own throat, something it had been doing since I was twelve. I’d stopped fighting it somewhere around twenty. My heart was racing, my mouth had gone dry. But I knew I was safe in my bedroom with the curtains closed against the day. Nothing in here was on fire.
I did the catalogue — something else I had been doing since I was twelve — and one of the kinder things life had given me was a profession that needed a catalogue every shift, so what had been a private survival inventory was now a billable skill.
Outside, the noise was sorting itself. Engines dropped out one at a time as their riders cut them — thuck, thuck — until one was left running, throaty and slow, and I knew without going to the window: a man with a wrench at the end of a driveway, twisting the throttle in idle to listen for the thing that was off about it. The kind of sound that did not ask the neighborhood’s permission.
I'd told myself I'd find out who my new neighbor was in the morning, when I had first spotted that SOLD sticker four nights ago, and then the morning had happened to me, and then four more mornings had happened to me, and the most attention I'd offered house since was a glance through the kitchen window when the kettle was on.
I crossed to the dresser and pulled the curtain back an inch and looked.
Five bikes. Black, mostly. One oxblood. Parked nose-out on the wide concrete of the new neighbor’s driveway, every front wheel cocked to the same angle.
A handful of men stood around them with coffees. One was carrying a box. Another was laughing at something somebody had said.
Nobody appeared to be planning a felony.
My pulse declined to be reassured.
A knock on the screen door. Willow let herself onto my porch before I’d crossed the kitchen, because Willow had let herself onto my porch every morning and every afternoon she had been ambulatory since the day I’d moved in eight years ago. The day after the closing, she had appeared on my flagstones with a chicken pot pie and the announcement that the neighborhoodhad been improperly inhabited until I came along, and we had been family ever since. Eighty-four years old, four-foot-eleven, hair the color of saltwater, and a heart of gold inside a personality engineered to hide it.
She had two cardboard cups balanced in one hand, a foil-covered dish in the other, and the unhurried face of a woman who had been waiting since seven a.m. to be looked at.
"Don't even think about helping me," she said. "I'm eighty-four years old and I have been carrying things since 1948."
"Willow."
"Sit down before you fall down. You look like a wet cat."
I sat. She handed me the coffee. The sleeve had given up somewhere out on the lawn.
"Dottie's," she said, referring to the 24/7 diner in town run by the woman of the same name. "She knew the flat white was for you before I'd opened my mouth. She is a witch and I have made my peace with it."
I took a sip. The caramel hit and my eyes closed around it without my permission.
"Oh, my god. Willow. That is delicious. That is exactly what my tired soul needed."
"On your behalf" — she lowered herself into the second wicker chair one vertebra at a time, like the chair should be grateful — "I have been doing intelligence work since dawn."
"You've been doing what —"
"Sophia. The man across the road is a biker."
