"I have to go in," Reggie said. "There's a showing at eleven. If the Oakridge model floods again, they call me either way."
She nodded. "Will you—will you come back after?"
"I live here," he said, and then he heard how temporary the sentence sounded even while it claimed permanence. "For now."
She looked as if she wanted to reach for him and had wisely decided not to. "I keep thinking about the first night he came here. How careful we were about the blinds. How Scout growled and I told him to stop like the dog was the problem." Her voice thinned. "The dog knew. Dogs always know."
Reggie glanced at Scout, who was watching them from the rug with the steady patience of a creature who had been catching feelings in this house longer than either adult wanted to admit. "He barked at the back door for months," Reggie said. "I thought it was deer."
"Sometimes it was deer," Sondra whispered. "Sometimes it wasn't."
He walked Scout around the block the short way, avoiding Evelyn's driveway. Scout kept looking back toward home as if he understood that routes could become politics. When Reggie returned, Sondra had set a plate of toast on the table. He ate two bites because his body needed fuel and because refusing food felt like theater he did not have energy for.
On the drive to Summit he passed the logistics center on Route Nine without meaning to. The parking lot was full of dark trucks. He did not look for Franklin's. Looking would have turned pain into a hunt, and he refused to give the day that shape.
At work the model homes were bright and empty. Reggie replaced a cracked switch plate, checked the filter on a unit that had been complaining, wiped a fingerprint off a stainless fridge that had never held milk. A realtor named Phelps walked through with a clipboard and said, "Looks perfect, Colton," and Reggie said, "That's the job," and smiled with his mouth only.
On his lunch break he sat in his truck and stared at his phone. He almost called his sister, Cheryl, who lived forty minutes away and had always been able to hear the crack in his voice before he admitted there was one. He did not call. Not yet. Saying it out loud to Cheryl would make the night into a story, and he was still living inside it.
He texted Sondra instead, against his own instinct: Coming home at 5.
She replied: Okay. I'll be here.
No hearts. No apologies stacked like sandbags. Just the thin rope of remaining.
***
In the late afternoon, before the second night fully arrived, Reggie sat on the back step with Scout and tried to reconstruct the timeline without turning it into a courtroom.
Seven months. That put the beginning near late winter, when Summit opened the Cedar Spur models and Holbrook doubled the on-call calendar. Reggie remembered coming home one February night with his boots soaked, finding Sondra awake at the table with her laptop, saying she couldn't sleep. He had kissed her forehead and gone to bed. He had not asked why sleep had left her. He had treated her insomnia like weather.
She had started tutoring Tuesdays in January. Franklin, by her account, appeared in the adjacent classroom soon after. Coffee. Parking lot talk. Bench talk. Then, somewhere in the thaw of March, the first time she did not come straight home. Reggie had been replacing a water heater in a model that would never shower anyone. He had texted her a photo of the old unit like it was a trophy. She had replied with a thumbs-up emoji. He had felt proud. She had been somewhere else learning the shape of another man's attention.