Will we finally talk about arrows? Did he have any clue that I’d thrown my trauma at him in hope of scaring him away?

“You ready for a core dump?” His hands, resting on his thighs, curled slowly into claws. He laughed, a harsh escape of breath. “Not sure I am.”

“You don’t need to . . .”

“No. No, I do. Like I think you did.” He stared at his hands as if just noticing the berry stains, then shrugged and plunged in. “I was married before Abel. Actually married. Not many bother these days. She was . . . Sara. A wonderful woman. The love of my life, at the time. We were at university here in the city, during the Long Hiatus after Hasan. People were rebuilding. No superstorm for eight hopeful years. A future seemed . . . possible.”

He stopped, looked down. I was practically holding my breath. Not the sort of story I’d expected. I’d never given a thought to his life before Abel.

“But I was . . . my parents were . . . on and off. They’d never been happy about the marriage, then Hurricane Felix put the city back to square one. Sara and I retreated to . . . well, my family’s place upstate, away from the floods and curfews and rationing, to raise what we hoped would be our kids. The area was already crowding up with refugees, but it was high ground, you know? There was room enough for a garden, animals. I was working on a novel.” He laughed, like can you imagine anything stupider? “Who would print it? Who would read it?”

I settled myself more comfortably, pointlessly shifting berry boxes on the tray.

“Sara had been pre-law in college. For some extra income, she acted as a negotiator in some of the land disputes that constantly went on. I’d go off on research trips now and then, for my book. One night, I . . .”

He paused for a long while, then scrubbed his chin roughly and sighed, as if there was nothing for it but to leap off the edge. “One night I came home to find the place lit up by police flashers, a SWAT team deep in a standoff with a group of gangbangers who’d invaded the house looking for food and guns, and Sara . . .” He glanced away. “My wife, already zipped up in a body bag at the bottom of the driveway, shot dead as she called 911 and tried to escape.”

“Oh, Daniel . . .”

“You could still do that then, 911—upstate at least. We had no guns in the house, and Sara would have fed them, if only they’d asked.”

Like Smiths and Adders, I mused fleetingly.