“I won’t take them out to rob any banks,” she said. Seeing Fappy’s surprised expression, she said, “I noticed the subtext, when you said you wanted them left alone.”

“I don’t even know what subtext is,” he said. He smiled. “You and Stan were always the ones with brains.”

“It’s fine. I don’t rob banks anymore,” she said.

“You’ve been quiet, the last long while.”

That, too, was hard to respond to. It had been weeks dealing with being sick, no human contact except the voices on the television and radio, and communicating was hard.

“Good luck, doing whatever you end up doing,” she said.

“You too,” he said.

She bent down to pick up her hook and bags, pausing to clench her right hand. She’d broken it after killing the giant four years prior, and it hadn’t healed quite right, despite her best efforts.

She grabbed the hook with her other hand, and her power kicked out, almost pushing it from her grasp. It missed the bags but it damaged the corner of the wall. Nothing more serious than what might happen if a car bumped into the siding. That was fine.

“Hey,” Fappy called out. “Damsel?”

She straightened, holding just the hook without the bags.

“I might never see you again. It’s bugging me. Should we have done anything different?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Fappy pulled off his hat and scratched at his hair. “Should we have invited you to hang out or had a cigarette with you? When Stan had the room setup in the garage, we watched videos. Should we have had you over? Would that have been weird?”

Having been sick, her defenses weren’t what they were supposed to be. The questions were hard to hear.

“It would have been weird,” she said. “The only thing you should have done differently was not fuck up the bank job.”

Fappy snorted and smiled. “Yeah. Sorry.”

She put the hook through the straps of the bags, then lifted it, shrugging her shoulders to make it comfortable.

She didn’t know Fappy’s real name. She wondered if he had stopped using it, and if he had, when?

The town wasn’t a thriving one, and there wasn’t much traffic at ten o’clock at night. She made her way down the street. She was cold. Another case of her defenses being down. She hadn’t grabbed a lot of blankets, sheets, or towels, and now she regretted it.

There were streets that were okay, with houses in decent condition, but most were struggling. Many had peeling paint, or siding that had come partially free in a bit of bad weather and never been fixed. She walked past a car that had been left there for so long that the windshield was opaque with the effects of weather and bird shit.