I stood up from the dresser drawers, from that family heirloom from the farm that smelled of people and places I’d deserted or had deserted me. With, I realized, an almost pathological number of photos of me, my daughter, my husband. To erase it.

“Can it wait until tomorrow?”

“It won’t take long. Out in the yard.”

“I heard you were thinking about a fence. And doing yardwork or something.”

I said it like he’d been thinking about building a hill out of mashed potatoes in our living room. But it’s true it was unlike him. For some reason, he had always treated landscaping like bringing his work home with him.

“Yes. To a fence,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

There it was, at the fringe, evidence that wasn’t a phantom SUV or a sullen Fusk. In that wooded corridor between our house and our neighbor, haunted by the ghosts of garter snakes, rabbits, and deer. It was a quiet place, I’d always thought. Too silent for a wood. No thought for why. Now the stillness deepened.

“See why I brought you?” my husband said.

“I understand,” I said. The last of the energy I’d brought from the plane dissipated into the ground. Even if it had been a kind of poison in me. A dizziness in the gathering dusk, some nausea.

A flattened patch of earth, the grass yellowing. Behind a large oak tree. Perfect vantage to surveil the house. A single cigarette butt. A beer bottle, Belgian import, that might not have been related. A couple shoe prints in soft dirt. Deep imprints. Someone was very large or had stood there a long time. A tree branch had been snapped off and shoved into the ground. Boredom? A message?

“Drifter,” I said.

“Drifter?” my husband echoed, incredulous. “Did you just say ‘drifter’ like we’re in a fucking western or something? A ‘drifter’ in suburbia.”

He didn’t swear at all unless intensely upset.

“When did you notice this?”

“I don’t remember—a couple days ago. But from those shoe prints overlapping, he could’ve come back since.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Didn’t want to bother you.” Hands in his pockets, staring at the ground like a kid.

“And yet it bothers you so much I’m on the receiving end of … whatever this is.”

I let out my breath. I had been threatened with a gun less than twenty-four hours before. No stamina to keep being mindlessly reactive. Which just made me feel even grainier, like I needed a shower.

“Has a homeless man been seen in the neighborhood?”

“No, Jane. This feels more like someone watching us.”

“Because of the cigarette butt?” Incredulous.

“You tell me.” Resentful.