"Somebody like Shawna Biddle's client?"
He didn't say anything. But his face did something small and involuntary, a kind of flinch around the eyes, like a man who'd been handed a hot pan without warning. Then he said he should get going, and he went, and I watched him from my front window as he walked down my driveway, and he didn't turn toward Sheryl's house. He turned the other way, toward his own, and he walked slowly, the way people walk when they're thinking about something they don't want to think about.
That afternoon, as if on cue, the fourth letter from Shawna Biddle arrived. Same cream paper. Same smile.
Dear Mr. Overbeck, it said. I understand you may be going through a difficult time, and I want you to know that my client's offer remains open, and that we are prepared to move with discretion and speed. Sometimes a fresh start is the kindest thing we can give ourselves.
I put it in the drawer with the other one. I took a photograph of it first and sent it to Rhoda.
Oh, that's lovely, Rhoda texted back. Keep that.
On the sixth day, I met Garnet Kinsella at the mailboxes.
Garnet was Sheryl's husband, a retired hospital pharmacist, a tall, stooped, quiet man who spent his weekends in a garage workshop building birdhouses that he gave away at the block party and that were, honestly, beautiful. In eighteen months I'd exchanged maybe fifty words with him, almost all of them about the weather and, once, at length, about the correct entrance-hole diameter for a screech owl box, which is three inches, and which he had approved of in mine.
He was standing at the cluster mailbox at the end of the court when I walked up, sorting a stack of catalogs. He saw me and went still. For a second I thought he was going to leave without his mail.
"Grady," he said.
"Garnet."
We stood there. I opened my box. Bills, a pizza flyer, nothing from the HOA, nothing from Shawna Biddle. Garnet was looking at the catalogs in his hands as though they were written in another language.