One word, and then the hammering resumed.
I waited for more. A name. A follow-up. Something. The silence stretched—or what passed for silence between hammer strikes.
“I’m Kayla Cafferty. I live on this side.”
Another pause. “Ben.” A nail driven home. “I figured.”
“Right. Because of the fence. And the…being on this side of it.” I was rambling. I could hear myself rambling. This was what happened when someone gave you nothing to work with—you started filling the space yourself, piling words into the gap like sandbags against a flood. “So, Ben, you just moved in?”
“Yep.”
“How are you liking it?”
“It’s fine.”
Two words that time. Felt like progress.
“The neighborhood’s great. Quiet, mostly. The Jacobses two houses down have a rooster, which takes some getting used to, but after a while, you stop hearing it.” I stood a few feet back from the fence, arms crossed, having a conversation with cedar planks while a stranger on the other side decided how few syllables he could get away with. “Where’d you move from?”
The hammering stopped. A beat of silence, and then a face rose above the fence line. After all those minutes of talking to wood, I found it a little jarring to suddenly have someone looking back at me—and lookingdownat me. I was getting a view of his chin.
Ben could see right over the top. Not by much—a few inches—but enough that he was looking down at me without any effort at all. I, on the other hand, was talking to the wood grain somewhere around his sternum.
“Around,” he said.
The sun was behind him, putting his face partially inshadow, and I was tilted back at a ridiculous angle trying to see more than a chin and a jawline.
For a woman who’d spent the better part of a year being made to feel small by someone who did it on purpose, having a conversation from below wasn’t something I was willing to do by accident.
“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I went back inside, scanned the mudroom, and found what I was looking for—the plastic milk crate that had been there when we’d moved in. Perfect. I dragged it outside.
By the time I got it positioned near the fence, I was slightly out of breath. I stepped up onto it, tested my balance, and stood.
Now I could see him.
Mid-thirties, maybe. Deep-set eyes that were some indeterminate color between brown and green. A face that had been outdoors a lot—not weathered exactly, but lived-in. Strong features, the kind that were more interesting than handsome, and a stillness to his expression that felt deliberate, like he was used to pressure.
Something shifted in his face when I appeared at eye level thanks to my crate. Barely there—the slightest movement at the corners of his eyes that could have been surprise or could have been amusement. I couldn’t tell. The man’s face was a locked room.
“That’s better,” I said.
He raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment.
“So,” I continued, because apparently it was my job to keep this conversation alive through sheer force of will. “You said you moved fromaround.”
“I travel for work. This is temporary.”
Seven whole words—a personal best.
“What kind of?—”
A sound from inside his house cut me off. Sharp, sudden,explosive—barking. Not the lazy woof of a dog who’d heard a squirrel, but full-throated, urgent barking that escalated fast. Then scratching. Something on the other side of his back door was trying very hard to get through it.
I hadn’t known he had a dog. In the entire week since he’d moved in, I’d never heard a single bark.
“You have a dog?”
