Keegan led her to the kitchen doorway and stopped. His mother had never condoned alcohol. There would be no corkscrew in her kitchen. “Did you bring something to open it? I don’t think—”

Eve stopped short. “Oh, no,” she said. “I never thought to.” Then she smiled archly and swept past him into the kitchen. She set the bottle on the table. “I’m going to need a shoelace and a small screwdriver,” she told him.

There was that playful tone in her voice again—impish and musical. It loosened the tension Keegan had been holding in his shoulders all day. He pulled open his mother’s kitchen junk drawer and stirred through the contents. “Phillips or flat blade?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Eve said. She came and stood behind him.

“The screwdriver,” he said. “You know. A plus or a minus?”

“Oh, I see,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter, but smaller is better.”

She was standing very close to him. He could feel her body radiate warmth along his right arm. He sensed her soft breathing. She had shampooed her hair before she came over, and it smelled of lavender. Keegan closed the drawer and pulled open another.

“That one will do,” Eve said. She reached around him and plucked out a small Phillips screwdriver with a blue rubber grip. She brandished it like a scalpel. “Now all we need is a shoelace.”

Keegan pushed the drawer shut and went out to the living room. He considered pulling the laces from his own shoes, but they had lost their aglets and their ends were unraveling. He found two pairs of brown Kiwi laces in his mother’s cantilevered sewing box, still wrapped in cellophane. He brought one of them back to the kitchen.

Eve shook out one of the laces to its full length, and as she did, Keegan noticed the way her crimson nail polish caught the overhead light. She hadn’t been wearing polish that morning; he would have noticed it as he was showing her how to hold the gun. She had taken time to get herself ready for this visit. Keegan wasn’t sure what that might mean, but the idea of it pleased him.

Eve made a show of clapping dust from her hands. “You might want to stand back,” she said. “This can get messy.” She braced herself against the kitchen counter and worked the screwdriver deep into the cork, twisting and pushing, until it broke through the bottom side. She pulled the screwdriver back out and handed the bottle to Keegan. She tied a knot in one end of the shoelace and cinched it tight. She took the bottle back and used the screwdriver to push the knotted end of the shoelace down through the hole she’d made in the cork. As she worked, Keegan admired the long, lean muscles in her bare arms. “This I learned in the most exclusive all-girl boarding school in the Bay Area,” she said. She wrapped the loose end of the shoelace around her fist, bit her lower lip and began to tug. “Do not try this at home,” she said, a little out of breath. “I’ve had plenty of practice.”