There were pizza boxes on the floor, more gray newspapers and stacks of mail, a smell of sour milk and dust. Clothes were slung over the back of the couch, the cushions rumpled with sheets. Someone had been sleeping there, in front of the dark fireplace.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

Grayson tried to close the door. “Thanks again for your help. I can take it from here.”

“You live alone?”

He didn’t look at me. “The Church.”

“The Church?”

“My folks couldn’t find a renter for the house so...when they left with The Church, I gave up my place and moved in here.” He sighed, launching into something I could feel he didn’t want to tell me. “The plan was I would stay here and work until The Church got settled. But business at the restaurant hasn’t been great. My shifts keep getting cut, and you can’t walk anywhere from here. It’s not like there’s a bus. The plan was...” He shook his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“I guess I’m not doing so great here on my own.”

“Why were you chopping wood?”

“The bills were too high. They shut off the gas. I still have the microwave, for cooking.”

“But you don’t have any heat.”

That was the other thing I felt, standing in the doorway of Grayson’s house: a cold so sharp it cut me. A chest-hurting cold, cold that made it hard to breathe. That meant the heat hadn’t been on for a long time. Cold had crept into the folds of the drapes, into the cracks in the floor. I tried to imagine sleeping in that kind of cold, how it crawled under the skin.

I had been calling Lisbeth since the vans pulled away. Her daddy’s cell rang and rang. Her parents wouldn’t let her have her own phone—a worldly distraction, they said. Both Lisbeth and my mama, the two most important women in the world to me, were cut off from me. By men. Had Grayson been able to reach his folks?

I looked again at the clothes, the sheets and pillows on the couch beside the black and still fireplace, littered with ash. The sheets were flowered, which somehow made them sadder. The quiet of the house pressed down on me. I thought of my own house, empty, the farm growing quieter and quieter with each cold day. Grayson and I had both lost people.

“Get your stuff,” I said to him.

He protested but not for long. He apologized, as if he had done something wrong. Only fallen behind, that was all he had done. An empty milk carton could turn into a trash pile in days, I knew. Rust could take a tool left out overnight. Just for a little while, I told him. Till his foot began to heal. I had the space. And I had heat.