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Four fingers and a thumb. Through cotton. Low on her spine, warm, and not pushing, just there, the way a man’s hand is there when he’s been raised to steer women through doors and has never once thought about it.

She thought about it. Her whole body thought about it. Heat went down from his hand and straight up from it at the same time, into her face and down between her legs. For one second, in a diner doorway, with a seven-year-old holding her other hand, she wanted to lean back into that palm and find out what it would do. She stepped out of it instead. Hard. Sideways, into Delia Voss, who said “Oh!”, and out onto the sidewalk with the coffee against her chest and her heart going hard.

He’d felt her do it. She saw that. He stood in the doorway with his hand still up where her back had been and looked at her, and his face didn’t do anything a room could read, and then he put the hand in his pocket.

“Sorry,” he said. Quiet, under the bell. He meant it.

“Don’t do that.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it, Brody.”

“I said I won’t.” He looked at Levi, and at the syrup, and at the sack of coffee, and back at her. “You got the right one?”

“Earl says the other one’s on sale.”

“Earl’s been saying that since the first Bush,” he said, and went in, and the bell rang, and she heard Pearl say his name from the counter, and she stood on the sidewalk outside Pearl’s Diner with the sun on the back of her neck and a boy looking up at her and did not put her own hand on the small of her own back, which she wanted to.

“You okay?” Levi said.

“I’m fine.”

“You look hot.”

“It’s July, Levi.”

“It’s only the second,” Levi said, and she took him to the truck.

She sat in the cab with the engine off and the windows down and let Levi run to the pump to look at a dog, and she put both hands on the wheel and breathed.

It was a hand. Two seconds, a crowd. Six weeks of a man outside her building and six weeks of flinching when a stranger’s sleeve went by her in a line, and she’d thought she’d gotten that under control somewhere in Oklahoma. Fine. That was the story, and it would do for Delia Voss.

It wasn’t the story. She made herself be honest, because she’d promised herself in Indianapolis she’d at least do that. She knew a flinch. She’d been living in one. That hadn’t been fear going down her spine off his hand. She’d stepped out of it hard because for one second she’d wanted to step back into it, all the way, in front of God and Delia Voss, and that was a great deal more frightening than a man who followed her to work.

Her body had been off since April. Shut, quiet, no interest in anybody, and she’d been glad of it, because it was one less thing. It had come back on in a yard on Monday over a pair of forearms. It had been on ever since. It was on now, in a truck in front of a feed store, with her thighs pressed together and her face hot and the print of four fingers and a thumb still on her back through the cotton. For him. For the one man in the county she’d have paid money not to want.

She’d told him not to do it. She’d meant it. She’d also, for one second, thought about turning around.

“There’s a dog,” Levi said, at the window.

“I saw.”

“Can we get one?”

“You’ve got two.”

“Those are Dad’s.”

“Get in, Levi.”

He got in. She started the truck. She looked in the mirror before she pulled out, the way she’d looked in every mirror for six weeks, and it was Soluno’s one street, and a hitching rail, and a diner with a bell, and nobody in it who wished her harm, and she drove.

Levi was asleep before the first cattle guard, with his head against the door and syrup on the seatbelt, and she drove the twenty minutes with the windows down and the radio off and the county going by, and she took stock, because it was what she did on a drive.

Four days. She had the kitchen, and John’s coffee, and Lara, who she’d have liked in any city on earth and who was going to be a friend whether Sunny had room for one or not. A boy asleep against a door who’d told a diner she was going home in November like he was reporting a death. A woman with a pencil in her hair who’d looked at her name and kept it. A doctor’s number. A florist’s laugh. A girl with horses on her shirt who’d put her on a porch on Tuesday without asking. She had a list of every one of those things in her head with a price beside it, and she’d pay them all off before she left, because she’d learned young what happened to a girl who let a place love her and then had to go.

And she had a man who’d put his hand on her back for two seconds and said sorry like he meant it, and she’d gotten wet in a doorway over it, in front of a child, and she was going to have to live in his house for three months and pass him on the stairs.