I look at the door.
I walk to the door.
I open it.
She is taller than I expected. And broad. She looks like she could carry me up a mountain. Maybe in her youth. She must be sixty now. Her hair is dark grey. She is in a uniform shirt with bars I do not know how to read, and a coat over it and her face is a face that has seen the inside of a thousand bad nights, and her eyes are slate, and she looks at me as though I am a problem she has come to solve.
"Mrs. Clark."
"I am not going by Clark."
"Mrs. Clark, I am going to come in."
She comes in.
I step back. She comes in past me into the front room. She is an intimidating woman and the air seems to part around her. She does not look at the kitchen. She does not look at the chicken in the oven or the bread on the board or the wine on the side table. She looks around and her face does not move. It is impossible to know what she is thinking.
She closes the door behind her.
She does not lock it.
"Sit down, Mrs. Clark."
"I would prefer to stand."
"Sit down."
I sit down. I sit down on the sofa with the quilt at my knees and the robe at my throat and the wine on the side table beside me, and she stands in the middle of the front room with her hands at her sides.
"Mrs. Clark."
"My name is Evangeline."
"Mrs. Clark, I am going to tell you something, and I am going to tell it to you once, and then I am going to ask you to leave this house, and a cab is going to come up the road in twenty minutes, and you are going to be in it."
“I won’t.”
“You will.”
"This is not your house."
"It is my firefighter's house. And what belongs to them belongs to me.” She says it with the confidence of someone who believes it.
I look at her.
"Mrs. Clark."
"Stop calling me that."
"Mrs. Clark, on the night of October fourteenth, at oh-three-fifty hours, a fire was set at the east wing of the Clark house on county road seventeen. The fire was set with a road flare and a small accelerant trail. The fire was set by Max Hale.”
My heart drops.
Of course a small part of me suspected this. But I had tucked that tiny part away and buried it because it suited me more to have sex with the woman who rescued me and cared for me. It suited me more to fall in love with Max.
The room does not move.
The room is very still and the lamp is on at low and the chicken is in the oven and the bread is on the board and the cabin smells of rosemary and butter and bread.”
