“If I could just use the facilities,” he added.

“Sure,” I said, trying not to smile. I had never seen Trevor on the make before. I couldn’t wait for him to go so that Jessica and I could marvel together at his audacity.

But as Trevor moved past me toward the house, she gave me a look like I’d taken out a pistol and started twirling it around on one finger.

“Get in there,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t let him be alone in the house.”

“Jessica,” I said. “There’s nothing in there. It’s all spread out on the lawn.”

Jessica leaned toward me and hissed: “Get the fuck in there.”

I stood for a moment, then went inside.

And what was I supposed to do? Trevor had gone into the downstairs bathroom. There was no reason for me to go downstairs — the place had been cleared out. But going up into the kitchen didn’t make sense either, if I was supposed to be monitoring him. Was that what I was supposed to be doing? But I couldn’t monitor him while he was in the bathroom anyway.

I stood there in the foyer, halfway between upstairs and downstairs, feeling silly. But I was also a little freaked out — my heart fluttering. It had to do with Jessica’s urgency — the way she’d hissed at me. But Jessica, I told myself, was being irrational — maybe because of the scare we’d had in the parking lot the week before with the man who’d screamed at Kelli. Maybe the encounter had left her feeling vulnerable, defensive. Jessica had been, I thought, heroic in the moment, brandishing her phone and taking one slow, wobbling step after another toward the man until he’d been successfully warded off. But afterwards she’d been withdrawn. We’d sat in the parking lot a long time, even after the cops had come and gone. The cops, a man and a woman, both of whom looked to me like teenagers playing dress-up, had watched Jessica’s video avidly, like children studying a turtle on its back. They had her email them a copy and said they’d be in touch. Afterwards, we just sat in the car as Jessica took long breaths and I murmured things I thought would reassure her. That the man was probably drunk, that he was maybe having a particularly bad day, that he had probably wanted to ask Kelli for directions or something and became confused and then incensed by her refusal to meet his eye or roll down the window.

At last Kelli had announced she needed to pee. And that, rather than all my murmured reassurances, was what seemed to snap Jessica back to her practical self. Someone had to pee. Someone had an immediate, functional issue, a basic problem to be solved. That had been the tonic Jessica needed.

Perhaps Jessica, I thought now, as I waited for Trevor in the foyer, was more readily freaked out by men in general — more than your average woman, I mean, given her past. Which I certainly couldn’t blame her for. But the fact was, she didn’t know Trevor, and I did. Soon he would emerge from downstairs and find me standing there, at which point I would tell him — what?