Jill lived on Tennessee Street, in an old green house with white trim. There was a big front porch where they had, during their few days together, eaten cereal from ceramic mugs and watched people make the hungover pilgrimage home. Since he’d last been to the house, someone had set up a hammock. An unfamiliar cactus stood guard beside the front door.

Before he could knock, Jill opened the door and did a double take. “Cliff. I was expecting someone else.”

Cliff cleared his throat and tried to figure what to do with his hands. “I wanted to see you,” he said. “Can we talk?”

“I’m sort of expecting someone—”

“Can we get coffee later then? Or dinner?”

She frowned, and he knew then that all of the doors he’d once passed through to get to her were locked and would never be unlocked again. “Are you still living here?” she asked.

Cliff nodded, not stopping to consider that this confession should embarrass him.

“I figured you would have moved somewhere else. Back to Wyoming. Or back home.”

“Well, I didn’t. I’m here.”

“Where are you living?”

“I’m renting a room, from the wife of a professor. Or at least they used to be married. I’m not exactly sure what happened to him. It’s just down Twelfth, on Alabama.”

Jill frowned. “The last name’s not DeLuca is it?”

“Do you know her? She’s been really great to me. She’s offered to help me with school—with my reading. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I’m going to enroll in classes. I want to get my degree.”

“Cliff,” she said, frowning.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Everyone knows her. Her husband—the professor—he killed himself. He tried to kill one of his students.”

For a moment, Cliff thought she was trying to be funny. “What do you mean? When?”

“Just last spring. He was a big name, was supposed to give a million speeches for graduation. Apparently he’d been having an affair with a student and when she cut it off he couldn’t handle it. He had a plan to kill her, but I guess when he got to her house he couldn’t do it. Said he loved her too much. That’s when he went home and shot himself.” She looked at him, perhaps to see if it was a good story. “His wife never mentioned it, before you moved in?”

“No,” he said. “I assumed they were divorced. Or that he had a heart attack or something.”

She looked at him as if to say, Of course you would think that. “Everyone says she’s kind of nuts now. I mean, who would stay in a house like that? I’d have been out of there the same day.”

There was a pause in which Cliff felt he should say something to defend Heidi, but he couldn’t figure what. That she was old? Nice? His friend?

“You know, it’s kind of funny,” Jill was saying. “The guy I was dating last year used to have a thing with the girl—DeLuca’s student—and when he found out about everything, about how she was almost murdered, he basically fell back in love with her. I was like, fuck that. So I started applying for jobs. That’s how I ended up in Yellowstone.”