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He doesn’t answer. He’s looking past me into the car, and I watch him take it in, one thing at a time. The seat laid flat. The pillow wedged against the door. My boots on the floor mat with the socks balled inside them. The garbage bags in the back with everything I own in them, the plastic bin of kibble, the gallon jug of water with a toothbrush rubber-banded to the handle.

His face doesn’t change much. His tail goes still.

Then the moose blanket heaves, and Billy Bob’s head comes out of it.

He looks at the window. He looks at Merek. One of his ears is inside out from sleeping on it. He takes a long breath through his nose, tips his head back, and bays.

Inside a closed Corolla, it rattles my teeth.

“Billy Bob. Quiet.”

He stops, mostly to breathe. Then he climbs over the console with his front half, shoves his face into the gap beside mine, and sniffs Merek’s hand very thoroughly.

Merek looks down at him. Rain is dripping onto Billy Bob’s nose, and he blinks at it, offended, but he doesn’t pull his head back in.

“You have a dog,” Merek says.

“This is Billy Bob.”

“Billy Bob.” He says it slowly, the way I read a name off a member’s card. Then his eyes go past the dog to the back seat. The water bowl in the footwell. The folding ramp. The orange pill bottle in the cupholder with BILLY BOB IVERSON typed on the label.

I can see him putting it together, and there’s nothing I can do to stop him.

“You told me The Nines,” he says.

“I know what I told you.”

“Did you check in?”

“Not yet. I was going to get a nap first, and then I was going to drive over and...”

“Tara.”

He doesn’t raise his voice. He just says my name, and I stop, because the rest of that sentence wasn’t going to help me, and we both know it.

He straightens up. For a second, all I can see through the window is the front of his jacket with the rain running down it. Then he crouches beside the door until his face is level with mine and puts one hand flat on the roof of the car. I can feel the heat of it come through the metal.

“You were here last night, too,” he says. It isn’t a question. “After the Solstice. After Lenart walked you out.”

I don’t say anything.

“That’s why you wouldn’t let me walk you to your car.” He’s half talking to himself. His eyes go to my hands, where they’re resting on the edge of the window, and I know what he’s thinking about, because I’m thinking about it, too. “Six hours ago, I couldn’t get your fingers warm. And then you came out here.”

“It’s not that cold.”

“Your breath is fogging the glass.”

It is. I hadn’t noticed.

“How long have you been sleeping in this car?” he asks.

He asks it quietly, and that’s the worst part. If he were angry with me, I could be angry back.

“Long enough to be good at it,” I say.

He looks at me for a long time. The rain keeps falling on his shoulders, and the lines on his throat are getting brighter, orange to gold, gold to the hard near-white I saw in the freezer doorway. Where the rain hits them now, it doesn’t even hiss. It just turns to steam and lifts off him.

He looks away, past my car, at the dark loading dock, the dumpsters, the delivery van I’ve been hiding behind for two nights. His jaw works.