When he moved out, she helped him. They picked out his new place together, and she brought over boxes in her car.

“I’ll see you in ten years,” Andrew said.

“For what?” Kateri asked. She lived less than a mile away.

“Everything will be different then,” Andrew said.

Afterward, she didn’t date. She didn’t then, and she still doesn’t want a boyfriend, although she misses the feel of another body, the weight of someone, the thrill in a deep kiss. She craved the exhaustion of sex, some use for her body that wasn’t work related. She sometimes didn’t even tell them her name. Or she said her name was Kate, or Katie, depending on the guy. She didn’t want to be traceable. She wanted sex as a physical transaction between bodies. When it was over, it was over, and it wasn’t bogged down by love and drinking and crying and trying to make a life together. She thought she loved Andrew. She did love him. But when she moved to Spring Falls, she came without any attachments, certainly not a boyfriend, not even a cat. Her last living relative had died. She felt unmoored and unattached and empty, like a good strong wind might blow her away. She took a sunny upper apartment in a farmhouse outside of town, with bright oak floors and white walls. She brought things that reminded her of her grandmother’s home: a dream catcher, river stones, candles.

When she was a rookie cop, the older men would hit on her. They liked her thick hair, her skin, the way her uniform stretched over her body. She had a burn on the inside of her wrist from when she was fifteen. Her mother’s boyfriend had caught her coming in after two in the morning and pressed the hot crown of his lighter into her flesh. He was younger than her mother. He wasn’t even thirty. “Next time,” he said, “your neck.” She’d been out with Andrew.

Halloween falls on a Tuesday. She stays late in an office filled with pumpkins and skeletons and then stops at home to change before she drives out to Mount Snow for a slow walk through an empty Walmart. She’s eager to be off duty. To be in regular, comfortable clothes, to shop anonymously. In the store, the costumes are picked over, half on the floor, ghoulish heads and witch hats strewn in the aisle. She buys one bag of candy, for herself, and some new candles, including a seven-day Lady of Guadalupe. No kids will come to her house. She leaves her porch light off. Cemetery Road is forty-five miles per hour, and people tend to go much faster. The kids in Spring Falls trick-or-treat in town.

She comes home after nine, when most of the town’s kids have gone in for the night, chilled to the bone and sugared up. There are trails of toilet paper in the trees, silly string on the stop signs, but the town is quiet. On Cemetery Road, one small car is parked off to the side, broken down, she guesses, or maybe it’s a couple. She catches it in her headlights when she pulls into her own driveway.