But Mick said, “Oh, we don’t want any of your things. We have plenty of things. We’re stocked. We’re good to go. We’ve been ready for something like this for a long time.”

“That’s right,” the second man said.

“We wanna know,” Mick said, “what you can do.”

“Do?” Grayson’s voice cracked.

Mick and the other man turned their heads and stared into the back seat. At me.

Everybody looked at me, Dance and Grayson craning back over their shoulders. Grayson looked panicked. Dance, though, had a different look. Resigned. He tightened his mouth. He turned back around in a flash while Grayson was still staring, horrified, at me.

Then they spoke at the same time, both to the men with guns, though Grayson looked at me when he said it. “I can cook,” Grayson said.

“I’m a truck mechanic,” Dance said.

“What?” Mick said.

Grayson started to repeat himself, but the man said, “No. Your friend. What he said.”

“I’m a truck mechanic.”

What an amazing liar, I thought, before I realized he was telling the truth.

“That your job?”

“No,” Dance said. “But it was my daddy’s job, before he got too drunk to do it. And he taught me everything he knows.”

“Works for me,” the second man said.

In the back seat I said nothing.

The men pulled back from the windows, and stepped away from the truck. With their guns, they indicated we should drive through the gate.

“Pull up to the main house,” Mick said. “You’ll know it.”

Dance rolled up the windows and gave a friendly, fake wave. Once we had driven a few feet away, and I could see the men in our rearview, standing in the frozen dirt, admiring the back of my house, Grayson said, “What the hell did you just get us into?”

“I got us out of a whole lot of shit,” Dance said. “They weren’t going to let us leave, not without—” he glanced in the rearview mirror “—something. Something bad.”

“Can you even fix trucks? Do you even know what you’re doing? Was any of that true?”

“It’s all true. My daddy was a mechanic once. I can fix whatever they want.”

“Well, they’re going to want a lot.” Grayson slapped the dashboard. “Why did we come this way?”

Dance looked at me in the mirror. “Wil, are you okay?”

I had felt a jolt go through me when I had seen the men, when they had leaned into the cab and noticed me, the way their voices perked up at the sight of a woman, the way they had paid attention. I had a bullet lodged in my chest, ice in my throat. I felt like I was being strangled. How could I tell Dance that?

“I’m fine,” I said.