The sunroom's off the back of the building. It got added on.
Slab, then walls, then windows in three of them, and a corrugated roof that does something in the wind.
There's a propane heater in the corner and a fire pit out past the door that hasn't been lit in at least a couple of months.
Two couches, a coffee table with a burn ring in it, a cooler somebody left out in the summer and never came back for.
Somehow, it’s the warmest room in the building when the heater's going.
She's on the far couch with her feet up under her and her jacket zipped to the chin, and her breath's going out of her in a cloud.
She's looking through the window at nothing.
At the dark. At acres of desert with a fence somewhere out in it.
There’s a bottle on the table. Two glasses, both of them upside down.
The heater's in the corner.
I get down on one knee and turn the valve and hit the igniter, and it catches on the second click, and the coils come up orange, and the whole room starts to tick.
"Turn it off."
She hasn't moved.
"It's thirty degrees in here."
"I know what it is." She still doesn't turn around. "I've been sitting in it for an hour and a half. Turn it off."
I turn it off.
The coils go dark and the room's quiet again, and I stand there like a fool with my hand still on the valve.
She doesn't turn around. "Sit down, Finn."
I sit on the other couch.
She reaches out, turns a glass over, pours two fingers into it, pushes it across the table, and then she does her own.
She doesn't look at me one time while she's doing it.
Her hands are steady. Steadier than mine have been all day.
"Amara's?" she asks.
"Dante's."
"Does he drink it?"
"No." I pick the glass up. "He's had that bottle since I got here."
She turns that over.
Then she picks hers up and puts half of it down her throat in one go, sets it back on the table, and looks at it like it said something to her.
Her eyes water. She doesn't cough.
"All those years," she says. "You know what I thought about? Not this. Never once thought about this."
