She sat up, rubbing her eyes and trying to nod her head, but her neck and back were so stiff. Where was she? She was with him, this man she had just met.

He began to take the food from the bag—eggs, butter, cheese, spinach, onions, berries. “Omelet?”

Eggs comforted her. “Thank you,” she said.

“I make a cruel omelet.”

“Cruel?”

“Sorry. Bad old joke. So old I don’t even notice when I say it.”

She got up and pulled on her underpants and jeans. The small stone woman she’d stolen from the retreat center had fallen to the floor, and she put it on the coffee table and went into the kitchen with Trout now at her side, coiling his tail around her ankles. Ever had shaved, and she could see the smooth line of his jaw, could smell—when he kissed her cheek, so naturally, as if they had done this many times before—the sandalwood of his soap mixed with the nag champa and coffee.

Izzy put on her shoes and went out to the truck for the extra food she’d stashed there for Dog. While she fed him, Ever took out some onions, heated oil in a pan.

“I’ll chop the onions,” Izzy said. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like cooking. Yes, she could. On Halloween.

After they’d eaten, mostly in a gentle silence, Dog waiting patiently at their feet for scraps, the sun through the skylight catching afire dust motes in the air, Ever asked if she wanted to shower.

“I need one,” she said. When had she last showered?

“You need one not at all. I just thought you might want to.”

“I don’t have a change of clothes.”

Ever went to a closet, neatly stocked, and handed her a clean towel and a black T-shirt.

Izzy thanked him and showered in a bathroom hardly big enough for her to fit, let alone for Ever; he must have to hunch over in the stall. Scrubbing at her skin with a washcloth, rubbing between her legs, feeling the prickle of nerves there, she thought of last night. She stepped out, toweled off, and put on her jeans and his shirt, leaving her rinsed underwear to dry on the towel bar. The clean towel even smelled of coffee, sandalwood, fireplace. She opened the medicine cabinet: toothbrushes, aspirin, bandages, gauze, hydrogen peroxide. She opened a drawer and rummaged around. There was a tube of toothpaste, which she used, squeezing some onto a wet finger and rubbing her teeth. There was floss in the drawer, a gold tube of lipstick, bobby pins, a few still trailing strands of dark hair. This made her shiver, and she shut the drawer.

“You should stay for a while,” Ever told her when she emerged. “My band’s coming to rehearse.”