Liam nods stiffly. “I’m sorry, too.”

We stay there, in silence, for long beats. If I go back to my room now, Liam will order a pizza and I’ll be able to fall asleep without having to hunt down my stash of earplugs. I almost leave to do just that, but something occurs to me: Things could be better. I could be better. “Maybe there could be a . . . a truce of sorts?”

He lifts one eyebrow. “A truce.”

“Yeah. I mean . . . I could . . . I guess I could stop raising the thermostat to twenty-five degrees as soon as you turn around. Wear a sweater instead.”

“Twenty-five degrees?”

“I’m a scientist. We don’t really do Fahrenheit, since it’s a ridiculous scale and . . .” He’s looking at me with an expression that I can’t quite decipher, so I quickly change the topic. “And I guess I could lay off with the Disney soundtracks?”

“Could you?”

“Yeah.”

“Even The Little Mermaid?”

“Yes.”

“What about Moana?”

“Liam, I’m really trying here. If you could please—” I am ready to storm out of the kitchen when I realize that he’s actually smiling. Well, sort of. With his eyes. Oh my God, was that a joke? He jokes? “You’re not as funny as you think.”

He nods, and doesn’t say anything for a moment or two. Then, “The Disney soundtracks are not that bad.” He sounds pained. “And I’ll try to be better, too. I’ll water your plants when you’re out of town and they’re about to die.” I knew he’d let my cucumber die on purpose. I knew it. “And maybe I’ll make a sandwich for dinner, if I get hungry past midnight.”

I lift my eyebrow.

Liam sighs. “Past ten p.m.?”

“That would be perfect.”

He crosses his huge arms on his equally huge, still bare chest, and then rocks a bit on his heels.

“Okay, then.”

“Okay.”

The silence stretches. Suddenly, this situation feels . . . tense. Sticky. A verge of some sort. A turning point.

A good time for me to leave.

“I’m going to . . .” I point toward the stairs, where my bedroom is. “Have a good night, Liam.”

I don’t turn around when he says, “Good night, Mara.”

Four

Four months, three weeks ago

There are plenty of things I wouldn’t expect Liam Harding to do when he enters the kitchen.

For instance, he’s unlikely to whip out castanets and flamenco his way around the island. To break into a Michael Bolton hit from the ’80s. To sell me a leaf blower and recruit me into some gardening tools MLM venture. These are all very improbable events, and yet none of them would shock me as much as what he actually does. Which is to look at me and say:

“It’s . . . nice outside today.”

It’s not that it isn’t. It is, in fact, really nice. Unseasonably warm. It’s because Earth is dying, of course. Rising average global temperatures are associated with widespread fluctuations in weather patterns, and that’s why we’re still wearing lightweight jackets, even though it’s late November in D.C. and Christmas trees have been popping up for weeks now. A few years ago, Helena wrote a paper about the way human action is increasing the periodicity and intensity of extreme weather events. It got published in Nature Climate Change and has about a zillion citations.