Chapter 3
Astrid
Moose had my bra in his mouth, and from the look on his face, he wasn't planning to give it back.
I'd just stepped out of the shower with a towel around my body, a second towel wrapped around my hair, and water still beading on my shoulders.
He must have come in while the water was running, because by the time I reached for the bralette I'd set on the counter, the spot where it had been was just a damp patch of laminate.
I turned my head.
He was halfway down the hall, beige bralette dangling from his teeth, head held high in the particular way he held it when he'd decided he was the king of something.
I'd watched him do this a hundred times in the apartment.
Socks. Hair ties. Once, the cap of a bottle of wine he had no business getting near.
He looked back at me from the end of the hall.
He was smiling.
Dogs didn't smile, technically. But Moose did.
"Moose."
He took off.
"Moose, no."
I scrambled out of the bathroom in a towel and a hair towel, the absolute worst possible state for any kind of pursuit.
Down the hall. Through the living room. Past the boxes I hadn't finished unpacking.
The bottom of the towel slipped against my knees, and I caught it with one fist at my chest. The hair towel rocked dangerously on top of my head.
"Moose. Drop it. Drop. It."
The thing about a yellow lab is that they wouldn't drop it. They had been selected, evolutionarily, for keeping their mouth shut around things they like.
He hit the front door at speed.
Which is when I remembered that I hadn't actually closed it after bringing in the welcome basket Mrs. Halloran had left on the porch twenty minutes ago.
The door swung in. Moose blew through it.
I went after him.
I was barefoot on the porch. Then I was barefoot on the front walk. Then I was barefoot in my own yard, and Moose was already across the lawn, weaving toward the Hallorans'.
A bath towel did not hold up to running. That wasn't what it was for. A bath towel was for standing still. The minute you started sprinting, a bath towel got ideas.
I kept it knotted at my chest with one fist and tried not to think about what the back of me looked like.
"Moose. MOOSE."
He was thirty feet ahead. He turned his head once to make sure I was still chasing him. Smug. Then he cut hard through the Hallorans' yard, past their roses, around the back of their shed.
I followed.
There was a low picket fence on the far side of the Hallorans'. He sailed it like the prince of mediocre dogs. I had to swing one leg over and pray. The towel was holding. Barely. The hair towel was not. It leaned to one side like a sinking boat.
He was crossing the street now. The road that ran in front of my house. The road that ran in front of—
No.
Anywhere but there.
I broke into a run, cut across the street with both hands at the knot of my towel, and put up a sky-high prayer that no one on Maple was looking out their front window.
Moose hit the bungalow's yard.
The bungalow.
That bungalow.
He cut around the side of the house. There was a wooden gate, standing open at the corner, like somebody had stopped bothering to close it.
I stopped at the gate.
The hair towel slid forward and hung over my eyebrow.
"Moose."
He was already in the backyard. I could hear him. Tearing through the grass, having the time of his life.
I stepped through the gate.
I told myself I would grab him fast. I would get him, I would carry him back across the street, and I would never speak of this morning to a living soul.
Then I came around the back corner of the bungalow.
It was a beautiful yard. Roses along the fence. A vegetable garden someone had been keeping up with. Two Adirondack chairs on a back patio. The morning sun was hitting all of it at the kind of angle that made you understand why people moved to Hartsdale on purpose.
Moose was running in circles around the lawn. Bra still in his mouth. Tail at full mast.
I crouched at the edge of the patio in my towel and tried to whisper-shout at him.
"Moose. Buddy. Come here. Come here. We're going home."
He kept running. He cut a wider arc this time, ears flopping, like he wanted to be sure I appreciated the difficulty.
I took two steps onto the grass. The grass was wet. The bottoms of my feet were going to be green by the end of this.
"Moose. I will end you."
The wet seeped through my soles. I could feel the seams of the patio stone against my heel where the lawn met the brick.
Then the back door opened behind me.
I closed my eyes.
I had a very specific second, half a second, less, where I held still on the wet grass and tried to figure out if there was any version of this where the person who'd opened the back door was a stranger.
A houseguest. A roommate. A meter reader.
Anyone but the one man I had been quietly avoiding being seen by since I'd seen him across the street.
I turned.
He was leaning a shoulder against the doorframe in sweatpants and nothing else.
His shoulders were tan, faintly damp at the hairline, like he'd come off a shift and into a quick shower and not gotten around to the second half of his clothes yet.
Blond hair too long on top, stubble across his jaw, a smile he was working very, very hard to keep off his face.
He was not succeeding.
The hair towel chose that exact moment to give up. It slid forward, off my head, and dropped at my feet in a wet white heap.
I wanted to die.
He took one look at me, then one look at Moose running tight circles with my bra in his mouth, and the smile he had been losing the fight against won.
He whistled. Once. Short.
Moose stopped mid-loop and sat down at his feet, like a dog who had been waiting for someone to tell him what to do all morning.
Easton looked down at him. Looked at the bra in his mouth. Looked back at me.
"I figured his owner would show up eventually," he said. "But I didn't expect you."
His voice was lower than I remembered, a hint of a Queens accent at the edges of it. I would have known him in a black room.
He'd known it was me before I turned around.
I tried to think of something to say and couldn't come up with so much as a vowel.
He bent down and eased the bra out of Moose's mouth without making a thing of it, held it loosely at his side like a man who handled women's underwear in his yard every Tuesday and couldn't be bothered. Moose leaned against his calf.
"Astrid Matthews," Easton said.
It wasn't a question.
"Hi."
He let his eyes go up and down me once, fast, and then he made the kind of decision a man makes for you when he can see you can't make it for yourself.
"Come inside."
I shook my head.
"I'm fine. I'll just grab him."
He didn't move out of the doorway. He just looked at me, one hand still loose at his hip, weighing me the way you'd weigh a problem you already knew the answer to.
"You're barefoot. You're wet. There's grass on the back of your legs."
The grass part was new information. I felt the cold print of it through the bath towel.
"I'll walk fast."
"Astrid." He pushed off the doorframe. The sun caught him fully on the shoulders for one second on his way out of the shade, and then he was on the patio with me. "Unless you're planning on giving the whole street a show on the way home, come inside. I'll find you a shirt."
I stood on his lawn in a slipping towel with my bra in his hand and weighed dying of mortification on the spot against dying of mortification in his kitchen. I decided the hair towel was a clothed person's problem.
The kitchen was, marginally, more dignified.
I came up to the patio.
He stepped aside to let me in, and I felt him not look at me as I passed.
I'd lived with a man for six years who'd always looked, who'd looked the way you check on a possession, and it took me a second to register that Easton Ford was keeping his eyes on the doorframe on purpose.
Polite. Careful. A different category of man than I had spent six years calibrating around.
"Bathroom's first door on the left," he said. "Hang on."
He disappeared down a hall.
I stood in his kitchen.
The kitchen of a woman who had been dead for a year.
Recipe cards in a tin on the counter. A half-finished mug of coffee.
A golden retriever lying on a braided rug, who lifted her head, blinked at me, and put it back down without commentary, as if women in towels were a regular Tuesday for her, too.
That had to be Penny. Mrs. Ford's Penny. Older now, white at the muzzle.
Moose padded over to her and lay down with his chin on his paws six inches from her face. She huffed once and let him.
How often had these two done this?
Easton came back with a T-shirt folded in one hand and my bra in the other. He held them both out to me without looking at either of them.
"Here."
The T-shirt was gray, Hartsdale Fire on the front, soft from a hundred washes. I took it. I took the bra. He looked at the cabinet over my head.
"Holler if you need anything."
"Thank you."
"Down the hall on the left."
I went.
The bathroom was small and tidy, and it smelled like a man who used unscented soap.
I leaned both hands on the counter and got a look at myself in the mirror.
The hair towel was somewhere in his backyard. My hair was plastered in dark wet ropes across my shoulders. The towel around my body had a long, damp line across the front.
I was barefoot in a firefighter's bathroom holding a Hartsdale Fire T-shirt and a beige bralette.
"Okay," I said, to no one. "Okay."
Moose had followed me in. He was sitting on the bathmat with his tail thumping like he'd done something he was very proud of.
I crouched down and put a hand on either side of his face.
"You and I," I said, very quietly, "are going to have a long conversation about boundaries."
He licked my chin.
I straightened, put the bra on, and pulled the T-shirt over my head.
It fell almost to my knees.