Then I remembered his previous visit — the cookie gambit — and dashed upstairs to wrap a couple in a paper towel, just as I had done to fend him off the day he first brought over Mike. The downstairs toilet flushed and I darted back down to the foyer just in time to intercept Trevor before the screen door could wheeze open again.

“Hey,” I said, handing him the paper bundle. “For you and Mike. For the road.”

“Well, thank you kindly,” said Trevor, taking the cookies. He went to stuff them into the pocket of his cargo pants, where they were sure to get crushed, but the pocket was already bulging with something or another, so he stuffed them into his opposite pocket.

He wasn’t meeting my eye. He seemed almost embarrassed to be alone with me. It was very different from our moment together in the kitchen last time I saw him, when he’d been so patronizing about how I couldn’t trust anyone, how I needed to be careful, showing me his palms, lowering his head to make me look him in the eye, to make sure that I was seeing him, understanding him. But now Trevor seemed, of all things, shy.

I realized that this would likely be the last time that I saw him.

“I guess you must’ve noticed,” I said after a moment. “We sort of cut back on home care a couple of weeks ago.” For some reason I was shielding myself with the words we and sort of — as if there were someone else involved in the decision, as if the thing “we’d” cut back on hadn’t been, specifically, Trevor.

He crossed his arms. They were sunburned, and the gingerish hair of his forearms had turned a platinum blond that made me think of the beach. He smelled like the beach too, or beach-food, anyway, the salty, deep-fried smell of the concession stand — maybe he and Mike had stopped for french fries on the way over. “Goin it alone, eh?”

“Yeah. You know, I’m not working right now. I just realized I can handle things on my own until Kelli and I get settled into our new place. It’s less complicated that way.”

“Good for you, Miss Karie,” said Trevor, nodding with pursed lips. “Like I said, I always knew you had it in you.”

As a leave-taking, I felt like this was going pretty well. Trevor seemed — not anxious to go, exactly, but certainly more than ready to. Perversely, it kind of made me want him to linger.

“We had kind of a scare the other day,” I confessed.

Trevor’s brow puckered. “A scare?”

“Some crazy guy,” I told him. “In a parking lot. We’d left Kelli in the car while we were looking at condos — Jessica and I — and some nut started screaming at her and beating on the car!”

Trevor frowned with every muscle in his face. “Jesus Christ!”

“I know,” I said.

“Police come?”