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man. He was nearly to the sidewalk.
    “What?” she yelled after him. She regretted the word the instant it slipped from her mouth. She was naked, after all, and wrapped, like a toddler, in a bedspread. Cassandra Danvers was no prophet, but, as the man turned, she instantly understood that she’d just taken the first step to dismantling her hard-won solitude. It was the direct way he looked at her, as though they already shared some kind of binding contract, one from which she would not easily escape.

He sprinted back up the path like she was saving his life. Even though she’d essentially become a hermit, Cassie could still read people like a book. This man coming toward her with a furrowed brow was stressed out. And much closer to her age—couldn’t have been a day over thirty—than she’d guessed when she spotted his professional-looking shoulders from behind.
    He mounted the groaning wooden steps. Her name trembled out of his mouth with a question at the end. He pocketed the smartphone and rushed across the porch. The phone inside the office stopped ringing; the grackles nesting to the left of the front door squawked to fill the silence.
    Sunlight ricocheted off the tiles that still remained on the Two Oaks porch. They were gray now, and wiggled in their settings, like diamonds in an inherited wedding band. Still, even more than a hundred years old, they were lustrous enough to reflect the sun’s beams and make this man approaching appear to glow. Cassie lifted her hand to block the glare. He’d been the one calling since yesterday, she understood in a wave of mistrustfulness; the house phone had stopped ringing the moment he pressed end on his cell.
    “I’m Nick Emmons.”
    His hand was out for a shake, but his eyes darted everywhere but her, assessing. She followed his gaze up to the dry rot along the crossbeams of the roof, then to the chipping column at the porch’s western corner. She felt as she had in the hospital, holding her grandmother’s wilted hand, wanting to shout, “This isn’t her! You don’t even know her!” to the well-intentioned nurses, with their charts and machines. All he saw here was a wreck. She narrowed her eyes at this stranger, imagined his foot breaking through one of the ancient floorboards that lined the porch’s tile. He’d be trapped waist-high, out of reach of the doorbell. She’d steal his smartphone and go back to bed and blame the whole thing on a house with a mind of its own.
    But now a breeze carried the scent of him, which was a bit like woodsmoke and a bit like Speed Stick, the green kind, the kind Cassie’s first crush, the high school student who’d mowed the lawn in Columbus, had worn. Here stood a good-smelling, impeccably dressed man, washed in the scent of Cassie’s early erotic fantasies, the corners of his mouth now pulling up at the sight of her; she couldn’t pretend she didn’t like the way the hushed blue of his tie played off the gray of the suit, or how a cowlick detoured a sprig of hair off his forehead.
    “This place is amazing,” he said, and she found herself delighted by surprise.
    But it was best to rip off the Band-Aid. “You from the bank?” she asked, pulling the bedspread tight, enjoying the nubble of chenille under her fingertips.
    “Eighteen ninety-five? ’Ninety-six?” He sized up the semicircle of yellow brick that framed the front door. “Was this the original entrance? Never seen anything like it.”
    “Uh,” Cassie said, then repeated her question about the bank, which he patently refused to answer. He tapped his foot against the slackened tiles, then turned to take in the view from the front door; she guessed that was his Ford Fiesta out front. A pickup pulled by, the only glimpse of the driver a tattooed arm out the open window accompanied by the twang of the country station. Nick surveyed the roof of the porch again before turning back and asking about the landline. Did she ever pick up? Why didn’t she have an