She squinted a little as she pulled the trigger. The old revolver jumped in her hand, but her grip on it was firm. The shot kicked up some dirt behind the stump and rattled the coyote brush across the ravine. The sound echoed down through the empty canyon. Nora, who had been sniffing around underfoot, rocketed into the bushes behind them with her rump tucked low and then looked out at them warily from the undergrowth.

“Did I hit anything?” Eve asked. Her voice was pitched high, flushed with excitement.

“Sure,” Keegan said. “Just not anything you were aiming at.” He straightened her shoulders with both hands and felt lingerie straps under the fine silk of her blouse. Her body was lithe and narrow in his hands. When was the last time he’d actually held a woman? He thought of Judy, with her dry lips and her smoker’s breath, and her sudden sullen moods.

Even back in college, he’d had a way of undermining every romance with petty jealousies and manufactured slights. An English major at USC, he’d been surrounded by countless, fiercely intelligent girls. He’d dated several, gotten serious with two. One—a bright, bohemian who wrote strange poems on a portable Royal Signet she lugged everywhere—he’d been with for six months, only to end it in a fiery, jealous argument because of her infatuation with a young professor.

The other had been more serious. Over two years, they’d talked of marriage and grad school and dreamt about a bookish, academic life in some bosky New England college town. He’d given her a ring. She’d been accepted to Dartmouth. They were to be married before the move. It was only after graduation that he let her know he’d been applying for jobs all over LA, and, come July, he’d be a cub reporter for the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

They’d been riding a Red Car back from the beach when he told her. He’d worried about fireworks and anger, tears and begging, but she had just nodded while he broke the news. She looked past him, out the window, at the passing palm trees. No anger. No weeping. It was as if, somewhere deep down, she’d been expecting this from him all along.

“Line up the sights this time,” he told Eve. “Get the gun up high, so you don’t have to duck down to see. Focus on the front sight. Let the target be blurry.”

Eve took a deep breath and held it. She fired again. Missed again. “Smells like the Fourth of July,” she said.

Keegan grinned. He was enjoying her playful mood. “Same stuff,” he said. “It’s all gunpowder.”