much, but she couldn’t tell him why, and it was just one more thing she knew she was doing wrong.
SHE TOLD ANDY WHEN HE dropped her off that she had errands to run, then she spent the rest of the day in bed, with the quilt up to her chin, lying on her side, reading a romance novel on her Kindle. When the sun went down, she went to the kitchen for a bagel and a Diet Coke and brought them back up to her room. She ate in the dark by the light of her reader, listening to the winds that weren’t uncommon so near the water. After a while, she put the book down and lay on her back on the bed, listening. When it started to roar, she got out of bed and stretched out on the thick area rug. She waited for that feeling of floating, like she was dropping into the earth. But she couldn’t stop seeing herself from above. Couldn’t stop thinking about how silly she must look stretched out on the rug by her bed like a crazy person. What adult lies down on the floor? Tim had asked her this once when he caught her snoozing on the carpet in the apartment.
She went to the window and pulled back the curtain to see how windy it was. She was startled at the sight of someone moving in the semi-dark in the side yard, almost out of the porch light’s reach, until she realized it was Dean, heading for the trash barrels with a garbage bag. As she watched, he whipped the lid off—she could never get it off smoothly like that, how did he do it?—and dropped the bag in. He took a couple of steps back toward the house, into the light, and paused when he inadvertently kicked what she soon realized was a big pinecone.
He picked it up off the ground and seemed to weigh it in his hand. She saw him look around the yard, over at the driveway, and even—she thought—up at her window. She instinctively stepped back. He tossed the pinecone into the air and caught it. He turned his body, those big shoulders, to face the house, then pivoted his head until he was staring across the wide backyard. It took her a minute to realize what he was doing, and then she saw his leg kick up, his shoulders rotate, his arm whip around, the pinecone fly across the yard and smack into the fence. He stared for a minute after it, at the spot where it had landed, and then he rubbed his right shoulder. He walked slowly over to examine the spot where it had hit, touching the wooden fence like he could read the splinters with his fingers.
He leaned down and picked up the pinecone, and he walked back to where he’d been standing. He repeated the motion: settled his body, stretched, rotated, let it fly, listened to it smack into the wood. Up by the window, Evvie moved the curtain aside a little more and leaned down.
He picked it up again. He walked in a couple of small circles, resting his hands on his hips. He tossed the pinecone in his hand, just a few inches, and caught it. Finally, he set himself again. This time, when his shoulders rotated, he uncoiled his body with such force that he almost knocked himself over. And this time, when it hit the fence, she saw the pinecone break apart and hit the ground in pieces. He stood for a minute with his hands on his hips, then bent down to rest his hands on his knees, like he was out of breath. Finally, he came toward the house.
It wouldn’t be fair at all to spy on him and then run downstairs so she could pretend to coincidentally run into him as he came in. If she was curious about what he was doing out there, she would just ask. She would at least tell him she had been watching. Spying was bad. Being nosy was bad. These were all the things Evvie was thinking as she took the stairs two at a time, down to the kitchen, where she snatched the kettle off the stove so that she was filling it just as the side door opened. “Oh, hey, I didn’t know you were out there,” she said as he came in, still wiping his hands on his jeans. “I was making