“Yes,” I get out. “I mean, I don’t … It’s John. He’s been…”

I can’t say it.

Matthew nods, stands. Then he closes his eyes tightly, physically absorbing the news. “John…?”

“Ashford. John Ashford. It was his car, truck, pickup, it rolled down that steep bit where he parks, I don’t know how.” I can’t stop spewing words. “It’s not like him to be careless, and I’m sure—I’m sure—I saw him pull the brake, I heard it click. It must have been broken.”

Matthew passes me, pulling on that frayed jacket he always wears. “Take me to him. We’ll get this sorted. I’ll show you what to do.”

He doesn’t offer me so much as a glance, but his voice is so uncharacteristically gentle that it takes me the entire spiraling descent and exit into glaring blue to register what he said: show me what to do. Like there’s been a job assigned to me and this is my training.

We walk so briskly I can hear the scrape of breath in my throat. My eyes graze the landscape in a blur until they land on the cell phone tower and the great pitted hill beyond. The tower’s metal door is open, clanging against the side of the building in each gust of wind. For a second, in a trick of light, the excavation site is transformed into a green, smooth hill, nothing moving. It just watches us.

I blink it away and look eastward, seeing the skeletal remains of Matthew Clare’s old cottage, charred wood and crumbled stone, cleared of belongings but never restored or razed, just abandoned. A sparrow hawk sits like a gargoyle on one of the exposed walls. There’s a burned trampoline frame in the back.

Of all the many things I’m terrified of in this moment, silence feels the most dangerous. Like something’s waiting in it, even out here in the open.

I fill it as we hurry south. We’re alive, we make noise, I have to talk. “You didn’t want to take your bike?”

Matthew lets out a breath of a laugh. “Not today.”

“Oh. Of course.” Of course what? None of this is even remotely in the realm of of course. “What were those machines on your desk?”

“They’re for the war effort.” His voice is curt now. More than usual, even. “I’m, ah, not really meant to discuss—”

“Right! Sorry. I’m not a spy. I swear. In case you were wondering.”

He turns quickly, startled, I’m sure, by the inappropriateness of me cracking a joke at a time like this, but if I stop and face this head-on—the truck I see now jutting from the grove, my dog locked in place as if possessed, bristled, barking and barking, and the object of Max’s fixation. Not an object, a man. My friend.