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"Thursday you told that guy you weren't interested in anybody. I figured that was my answer." I made myself keep going, my voice low and scraped raw. "So I went to the masquerade and took a stranger home, because there was nobody left to hold out for. And part of me knew it was you. I think I knew the second you walked up to me in that tent. I just didn't want to look, because if I looked, I'd have to want you with the lights on."

At the word Thursday she flinched, and her mouth opened and closed on something she didn't say. A tear slid down her cheek, and she didn't wipe it. Somewhere far off a kid squealed on the hayride. I took a step toward her, and she put up a hand. Wait. I stopped dead, because that was the rule. Her rules, always, and my whole body leaned against it anyway.

"I planned for everything but this," she whispered. It barely carried over the rattle of the stalks.

"Same." I huffed out something close to a laugh and pushed my hand through my hair. It was still shaking. "I'm thirty-nine years old, I've walked into buildings that were coming down, and I have never been this scared in my life. I'm making it up as I go, Molly. Don't run from me."

For one second she swayed toward me, half an inch, no more. I caught her scent, warm skin, something sweet from her soap, and hay, and my fists clenched at my sides as I locked every muscle I had to keep from closing the gap.

Then a pack of tourists came braying around the corner, six of them in costume holding a phone up, and she bolted. She went sideways through the service gap in the east wall, the one I'd signed off on myself, and down the fire lane I'd insisted stay clear. I stood there in the dead end with a family in matching skeleton shirts asking if this was the way out, and I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. They backed away from me, and I didn't blame them.

I walked out the long way, past the pen, where the volunteer had the kids under control and the goats were fed. Her car was already gone from the vendor lot. I stood there in the afternoon sun, my shirt stuck to my back and chaff itching down my collar, with no idea what to do next. I'd just told her more than I'd told anybody in years, and she'd run. I'd been too careful around her for two years, and look where it got us.

I checked my watch. The hardware store closed at six. Last week Molly had mentioned her porch light was out, and I'd been meaning to fix it. I wasn't going to leave her porch dark just because things had gotten complicated. I headed for my truck.

Chapter 7

Molly

Idon't remember the drive home. One minute I was running down the fire lane with corn chaff in my braid, and the next I was sitting in my own driveway with the engine ticking and my hands shaking too hard to pull out the key.

I had sat in this exact spot after my first council meeting, rattled by my reaction to the town's handsome fire chief. It was as if Grayson had cast a spell over me, and I was a woman who believed in science, not magic. Two years of observation hadn't produced a better explanation.

The porch light had been dead for a month, and the house sat dark. I put my forehead against the steering wheel. The plastic was cold and smelled of old coffee and dog hair, and all I could see was his face in the corn. He'd stopped dead the second I raised my hand. Ten feet away, shaking with the effort of not crossing it, and he'd stayed put because I told him to.

Scared, he'd said. Grayson Carter, who walked into burning buildings for a living, with his hair standing up where he'd dragged his hand through it. Scared of me.

I made it as far as the kitchen table. I sat down hard and put my head on my arms, and Trip came across the floor on his three legs and climbed into my lap as though I'd been installed there for his convenience. He shoved his head under my chin, and I buried my face in his fur and stayed there.

When I could think again, I did what I always did and started auditing. Numbers and facts were how I got through anything. Grayson had thought I was twenty-four or five. He'd never asked, because he was afraid of the answer, and when I told him he didn't care enough to find out, he'd looked at me as if I'd hit him. On Thursday I'd told a pumpkin vendor I wasn't interested in anybody, with Grayson standing right there, and he had believed me. So he'd gone to the masquerade and taken home a stranger. The stranger was me. I had done this to both of us.

Trip kneaded my thigh with his one good front paw, claws out. I yelped, and it turned into a laugh. It didn't last.

The auditor in me wanted to know why I couldn't simply believe him. I knew the answer. It had followed me here from Seattle.

Three years ago, I was engaged to a man who sold commercial real estate and called me every night from whatever hotel he was in. Six weeks before the wedding, he left his other phone charging on our kitchen counter. It buzzed all through dinner. The screen said Babe. I didn't scream. I did what I'd been trained to do and reconciled the last three years like an audit: every conference, every late night, every weekend at his brother's cabin. It all balanced. There was an apartment across the lake and another woman who believed she was getting the ring, and every lie had been built so carefully that it balanced to the penny. I caught accounting errors for a living, and I had missed three years of them right under my own nose.

I left the ring on the counter next to his phone. I was already burned out, and that finished me. I packed in a weekend and never picked up when he called, and I hadn't trusted my own read of a man since. There had been small things, a hotel receipt that didn't match a city, a dinner he couldn't remember, and I'd felt every one of them and talked myself out of every one. Michael Kane lying to me was one thing. How determined I was to ignore my own gut instincts embarrassed me far more.

Now a good man was telling me he was scared of me, and my record on reading men had a documented error rate. Worse, I was the one who'd shown up in a mask. I knew exactly how it felt to find out someone was a different person than they'd said. I had just done it to him.

Trip pushed his forehead against my jaw. I held on to him while the light drained out of the kitchen window, and my throat closed every time I pictured the next council meeting: Grayson in the chair beside mine, and the two of us with nothing easy left to say to each other for the first time in two years. Or worse, him taking a different chair.

I went to bed at nine but couldn't sleep. The window was cracked, and cold air lay across my face while the rest of me burned. Every time I closed my eyes I was back on his couch, my wrists on the armrest, his voice low against my thigh saying ask me, I want the words. The bruises on my hips throbbed with my pulse. I pressed my palm flat on my belly and told myself I wouldn't. Then I slid my hand lower anyway. I remembered his mouth, and his rough hands spreading my knees, and the way he'd said good girl against my skin. It took almost no time at all. Afterward I lay there in the dark, wanting the real man with his hands on me and the lights on, and no idea how to ask for it.

* * *

Sunday came up cold and clear. It was Halloween proper, and my breath smoked as I pulled the front door shut behind me at six-fifteen, keys in one hand, travel mug in the other. I made it two steps across the porch and stopped so fast the mug knocked against the door frame.

The porch light was on.

A new fixture, black iron with glass panes, poured warm gold over the frosted boards, the railing, and the three steps down to the walk. Frost crunched under my boots when I stepped closer. Ladder feet had dented the white grass at the corner of the porch, and a few curls of copper wire lay on the boards where somebody hadn't quite swept them up. The air smelled of cold earth and new metal. On the rail, dead center, sat a paper cup from the diner with a thin curl of steam rising off the lid. Down the road an engine turned over and faded into the quiet.

The light had been out for a month. The old fixture kept shorting, and I'd mentioned it exactly once, last week, over coffee before council, the way you grumble about the weather. I hadn't asked for anything. Grayson had nodded and gone back to his budget sheet. Lyle was the only other person who knew, and Lyle had once called an electrician to change a lightbulb.

I picked up the cup. It was warm through the paper, milky with one sugar, exactly how he'd fixed it at my first meeting before I'd said a word. He had never gotten it wrong since.

He'd stood on a ladder a wall away from my bed with a screwdriver, in the dark, and I'd slept through every minute of it. That was what got me. Not the corn, not the confession. I sat down on the top step in the warm gold light and cried, hard and fast. Nobody had ever left a light on for me. The coffee was the friendship, the gutters and the trough and the heavy things he carried without being asked. The light was something more, and he hadn't bothered to hide it. I could have defended myself against a man who wanted the woman in the red dress. I had nothing built against a man who rewired my porch in the dark.