She would take all of that haunting her dreams if it meant she never had to relive what came before it. Even so, there was a certain feeling that came with the dream, and it got darker with every house she ran to. In the dreams, the street had no end.

“I went to three houses before anyone came out.”

LJ took his hands off the steering wheel and put them in his lap. The first few times he’d come to give her cooking lessons, she couldn’t take her eyes off those hands. They were too big. He could circle her entire arm with his fingers and snap the bone as easily as he cracked the joint of a chicken. And yet, as he listened, those hands trembled more than hers.

“No one answered? What the hell kind of town—what the hell kind of people . . .”

Andra reached over and laid a hand on his arm, his skin blazing hot beneath her palm. She let go almost as soon as she realized what she’d done.

“It was the middle of the day. Everybody was gone at work.” She knew that now, but when she knocked on that first door, she hadn’t been thinking so clearly. It felt like the whole world had emptied out, and no one was left to care what happened to her. “Someone did come,” she hastened to add. “She heard me pounding on her neighbor’s door. She had to lean on a cane, but she dropped it to—” She’d dropped it to wrap her cardigan around Andra’s shoulders.

Andra swallowed. She should have gone back and thanked her. When the woman came to testify in court, Andra couldn’t even look her in the eye.

She cleared her throat, the quiet in the cab crushing her. Her stomach flipped over. She shouldn’t have told him the whole story. She should have stopped with the window, because what could he say after all that? And they had to drive all the way home still, with her story suffocating the air between them.