“Neither. Just got here,” I say, wishing I could figure out how to speak full sentences again.

“It’s a hard place to leave,” Adam says. “I came for school. Tried moving back to Boston after I finished undergrad, but the world doesn’t seem as right anyplace else.”

“It’s nice here.” I take a huge bite of my sandwich.

“Where you staying?”

I hold my finger up while I chew, but the bread is dense and crusty and the wait for words gets ridiculous. “Here and there,” I say finally, even though I still have food in my mouth. Margo would totally yell at me.

He laughs. “You’re into specifics.”

“Campground,” I blurt out, despite the fact that I meant to keep that information classified.

“Brave girl! You must be freezing.”

“I do okay,” I say.

“I’m sure you do,” he says, smiling. His teeth are too small, so it looks like he has too many of them. He’s not much bigger than me. His cheeks are round and flushed and he has a little button nose. His hat is probably covering a receding hairline and his eyes have the faint start of the kind of crinkles Margo calls crow’s toes. I had this book about Santa Claus as a kid, and Adam looks like one of his elves, the one who wasn’t good at making toys and had mismatched shoes.

“Well, I tell you what,” Adam says, “they know me here. They’ll vouch for me. I’m safe.” He digs his wallet out of his back pocket and fiddles through some business cards until he finds the one he’s looking for. He pulls a pen from his shirt pocket, writes a number on the back. “You get too cold at the campground, you call me.”

I want to jump at the chance to take another warm shower and sleep on a couch in an actual building with actual heat, but something about Adam saying he’s safe makes me worry he’s not. My dad always says anytime someone offers you something you have to figure out what’s in it for them. I don’t think Adam could be in it for whatever free coffee I could pass his way, so it’s exactly the kind of situation Margo would warn me about.

Adam holds the card out, but I don’t take it, so he kinda shakes it—the way you jog a fishing lure—until I do.

“Why would you…”

“I know what it’s like to be your age,” Adam says. “I wouldn’t go back if you paid me.”

I tuck the card in the band of my skirt without looking at it. Mumble, “Thanks,” to be polite, but set in my head that his place is not an option.