Page 7 of My Neighbor Literally Bites

Theo grunts approval from the tool table. "He's right about the footing. Always was bad ground there."

"It's my wall on my side. I'll have it looked at."

"It's half my wall. That's the trouble with shared lines." Something almost like dry amusement moves under the words. "I'm not offering to take it over, Ms. Marlowe. I'm telling you a thing about gravity."

"Generous," I say, echoing Clara without meaning to. A few people grin into their coffee.

His attention hasn't left me once. Not in a way I can call rude. He isn't crowding, isn't charming. He simply tracks me, unbothered, the way you'd watch the one moving part in a machine you don't trust. It should make my skin crawl. It does something less convenient than that.

I'm not doing this again. I spent years across a table from my ex-husband who analyzed my every move so he could use them.

"Theo," Alaric says, still focused on me, "you know that wall."

"Stone by stone."

"Then come before the rain. In daylight, so Ms. Marlowe can supervise and disapprove."

Lily makes a small strangled sound that is absolutely a laugh.

"I don't need supervising," I react.

"No," he agrees. "But you'd want to. I would, in my place." He inclines his head a fraction—to me, to Theo, to no one else—and turns. "Saturday morning. I'll bring the levels."

The entrance he came in closes, and everyone exhales. Conversation rushes back in to fill the space he left.

"Well," Ruby says brightly. "That's the most words I've heard out of him in a decade."

"Lucky me," I say.

Lily bumps my shoulder. "You're making that twitch thing with your mouth."

"What twitch thing?"

"The thing where you're annoyed and trying not to smile."

"I'm only annoyed." I pick up a lemon bar trying to act normal. Saturday morning. In my own garden, with witnesses, because of gravity.

On the drive home, I notice I'm still annoyed, but something tells me that it's more than that. In fact, I know it's not only that. It's that pull I feel when he's near.

6

ALARIC

Ilisten from outside the hall to all the conversations starting again now I've left. Lily laughs at something, and Hannah answers a question in her soft voice. Their voices dissolve as I hear two villagers on the corner, collars up against the wind.

"—after the old Marlowe place," the heavier one says. "Real polite about it."

I take it for talk about Hannah and Lily. Then the other shakes his head.

"Older fellows. Wanted to know who took Evie's things after she passed. Who got the house, her stuff."

"Strangers care about an old schoolteacher's boxes?"

"Said they were historians." He laughs, uneasy. "Asked if Evie had family who knew her work."

I cross to them before the laugh finishes. People here have learned not to expect conversation from me, and the lack of it unsettles them more than any sharp word would.

"These men," I say. "When?"