When he got to the deck, Reagan took a step back. He stepped back, too, to the edge of the stairs.

She kind of shrugged the pan at him. Like she wasn’t sure what to do next. There weren’t any chairs out here, and she was already losing her nerve.

“I have a mask,” Mason said, reaching into his pocket.

“It’s okay,” Reagan said. “We’re outdoors. And . . . it’s okay.”

“Here . . .” Mason backed down a few steps and sat, leaving room for Reagan at the top. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, sitting. She stuck a spoon in the pan and passed it down to him.

He took it. “Is that what I think it is?”

It absolutely was. Raspberry pretzel Jell-O salad. Reagan didn’t say anything. Just watched him take a bite.

“Oh my God,” he said. “Why don’t people still make this?”

Reagan laughed. He held the pan out to her, and she took a bite, too.

Mason was clean-shaven. His eyes were blue. He was square-faced and handsome.

He motioned at the front of his sweater with his spoon. “We do this ugly-Christmas-sweater thing now.”

Reagan nodded. “My family does that, too.”

He looked down at her chest, confused. She was wearing a snug black V-neck.

“Not me,” she said. “Fuck that.”

Mason laughed and offered her the pan again.

Reagan took another bite of Jell-O salad. There were three layers—raspberry Jell-O, whipped cream cheese with sugar, and crushed pretzels. “So are you back in D.C. now?”

“I was,” he said, “for a month or two. Then I bought a house in Omaha.”

Her head jerked up. “You moved back to Nebraska?”

Mason nodded. He was more earnest-looking this close. In the daylight. (And he’d already seemed pretty earnest in the dark.) “Yeah, D.C. just felt too far, after everything. And my apartment seemed so small . . . So I bought a house in Omaha. My brother says I got ripped off, but it’s palatial compared to what I could afford back east. I feel like a Major League Baseball player.”

Reagan laughed. This was a lot of laughing. “Did you quit your job?”

“No. I’m still remote.”

“Me, too.”

“That’s good.” He frowned. “I mean, is that good?”

“It’s what I wanted,” she said.

“Well then, good.” He took another bite of Jell-O salad. He had the pan in his lap. “I’m eating a lot of this, is that okay?”

“God, yeah,” she said, “my nieces and nephews won’t touch it. They say dessert shouldn’t be salty.”

“Okay,” he said with his mouth full, “well, one, this isn’t a dessert; it’s a salad. And, two, the saltiness is the best part.”

“You can have as much as you want,” she said.

“I will.”

Reagan smiled—then bit both her lips for a second. “Was, um . . . was everything okay last year?”

Mason looked up into her eyes. “Last year? You mean . . .”