Avalon had read up on all the best methods for removing wallpaper, all of which involved spraying and steaming and so forth. She’d dutifully watched a number of achingly tedious videos about the process, keeping her promise not to bug her parents.

And she’d given it her best shot. But none of the methods were foolproof. Only once or twice did that hideous black-and-gold wallpaper neatly peel away from the wall in little satisfying sheets, like a sunburn. The rest of it seemed to have become one with the wall.

She wound up doing a lot of scraping. It was brutally hard work but jabbing a metal implement at a wall was both punishment and reward.

The reward part was burning off a little angst.

The punishment part was because she felt like a shit for being mean to Mac.

She jabbed at the wall a little harder.

Chick Pea was happily dozing in the sun in her doggie bed downstairs, after gnawing for a while on a toy with what teeth she had left. Avalon was fully aware that she could have a heap of vet bills in her future. It hadn’t mattered a damn once she saw Chick Pea. The house felt like it actually had a soul now, a furry one. And truthfully, having a pet felt like exhaling a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

Mac had known that. But he also knew of her inclination to fall in love with creatures whose lives tended to be startlingly finite.

Funny that he’d been able to identify Corbin’s face even when it was rolled into a tube. Mac had clearly done some Googling, which on the one hand was normal and rather gratifying. On the other hand, there wasn’t much she could do to find out about him.

Apart from take jabs to see where it hurt.

There had been zero satisfaction in watching him go still when she hit her mark, though. She might as well have jabbed herself.

She had to hand it to him, though: Tools Monthly was actually pretty damn funny. Funny because it was true.

And Mac had said “we.” When “we” go to the vet. He included his cat as a little partner in that sentence, and this struck her as almost unendurably poignant and cute.

As she worked, she’d attached her phone to one of her Bluetooth speakers and set it to shuffle. That was a mistake, because some of the songs were songs Corbin insisted she listen to, by bands so obscure that he might actually have been the only person to have ever heard of them.

She kind of just wanted to hear Erasure’s greatest hits right now.

But then, suddenly, up popped a song by one of those Corbin-curated bands she actually loved: The Antlers. “Stairs to the Attic.” It began urgently but quietly, barreling toward an anthemic climax. It was all about the unbearable lure of closed doors, about the wonder and pain of them. And how when the singer made it to the top of the stairs, all he found was a whole universe of stairs.

“Whatever you do, don’t go in the attic,” Mac had said to her.

Damned if that wasn’t a metaphor for Mac in general.

Right then and there it seemed important to drop everything and go up into the attic.

The narrow flight of stairs—good dark wood mounted on a system of heavy chain pulleys—was down the hall in a modest-sized room probably used as an office over the years. She’d dumped the bean bag chair her parents had brought along in that room.

She experimentally put all of her weight on the bottom step.

No groaning or ominous creaking ensued; the chains held her.

So she took another step. Jounced a little. Again: no ominous creaking or groaning suggested she might not want to continue.

So she scaled the next and the next and the next.

When she was near the top she stood on her toes and looped her hand around one of the handles on the square door in the ceiling and pulled.

Nothing happened. It simply didn’t give at all.

So far the Mac metaphor appeared to be holding.

She peered up at it. It was likely sealed stubbornly by a decade of old paint and dust.

She scaled another step for leverage, then looped both of her hands around the door handle and yanked. Hard. A grinding crunch almost toppled her from her perch, but she caught her balance just in time. This time her yank had yielded an intriguing wedge of darkness. Her heart gave an exultant little leap.

She scaled the final step to give herself more leverage. Took a breath. And pulled at the door with all her strength.

The door banged wide open in a cloud of agitated dust.

When she leaned eagerly toward the opening, the stairs lurched and swayed as if they’d just hit an iceberg. She gasped and flung her torso forward, arms flailing, scrabbling for a handhold inside the attic. She’d managed to sling one leg up there, in a froglike splay just as, with a hideous, metallic shrieking groan, the chain gave way.

She screamed, threw her entire body forward, and crouched in a fetal position.

BAM.

The door snapped shut again behind her with a thunderous Armageddon-like crash and thud which shook the house.

“Holy shit!” she said out loud after a blankly terrified, stunned fifteen seconds or so of sitting in the pitch dark of the attic.

Her heart was pounding so hard for a moment she could hear nothing over the whine of blood in her ears. That easily could have been her toppling ten feet to the floor instead of the stairs.

That had certainly happened quickly.

But then she supposed none of the disasters of her life had happened at a leisurely pace.

How the fuck was she supposed to get out of here?

She remained motionless, allowing her breathing to settle, willing her eyes to adjust to the dark. She hesitated to let her hands crawl blindly lest they encounter something else out crawling with more purpose. The attic was festooned with cobwebs; they tickled her face. Her fingertips sank into velvety dust when she touched the floor. Shadowy outlines of boxes came into view. But there wasn’t much stuff, on the whole. Some random crap leaning in the corner, the typical flotsam of everyday life that wound up in the attic: an umbrella, what looked like a music stand, a pair of what might be barbecue tongs or those things you use to pinch stuff off high shelves, a solid-looking Ebenezer Scrooge–style cane.

A few patience-testing seconds later, she could just make out the outline of the door handle. She tugged. Hard.

It wouldn’t effing budge.

She tried pushing.

That didn’t do the trick, either.

She tried kicking it, thumping her feet against it like a trapped rabbit.

Nothing.

She yanked back hard, gripping it in her hands and letting the rest of her body act as a lever and pulled. “GnnnNNNNNNNNNARGH!” She staggered backward and landed hard on her butt. She drew her hand tentatively along the contours of the door, investigating a suspicion: yep. It was wedged at an angle. One of the hinges had likely broken.

Along with the stairs.

And so.

It occurred to her that this very well might be the reason Mac had told her not to go in the attic.

She scanned the space carefully and then . . . yes! Hallelujah! A sliver of light, behind stacked boxes. A window. She took two enthusiastic steps toward it.

Just as something rustled about three feet away from her.

She froze. Her stomach literally iced over and all the hair on her body stood up.

So she had company. Something bigger than a rat, from the sound of its scrabbly little feet. As much as she loved animals, it was difficult to be crazy about the ones she couldn’t see.

The box in front of the window shifted easily enough, but when she reached for the latch, it wouldn’t budge. The damn thing was painted shut.

Failing Chick Pea leaping free of the house somehow and running out to fetch Mac, barking a message (“What is it, girl? Did Avalon do something stupid again? Lead the way!”), she was going to need to break the glass. She had a hunch Chick Pea was a little deaf.

She seized hold of that old cane, made a fortress of the boxes, huddled behind them, pulled her T-shirt up over her head to protect against flying shards of glass, and then jammed the cane into the glass.

Nothing happened, except for a vibration that shot up her arm and into her teeth.

Now she was good and pissed.

She hauled back and whaled on the window like the building was on fire until finally, with a crunch and a tinkle, the glass gave way. She kept smacking until most of the glass was clear of the frame. Then stood on her toes and hollered through it. “Help! HELP! HEELLLP!”

Maybe she ought to yell “Get the paddles!” instead. She entertained a fleeting fantasy of her family convening upon Devil’s Leap, their Spidey senses a-tingle.

“Mac!” she bellowed. “Maaaaaaaaac!”

She suspected that even if he heard her, he might mistake her for one of his goats.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!”

Now, who wouldn’t get curious about the birthday song emerging from the middle of nowhere?

Still nothing.

She really was in the middle of freaking nowhere. And to think, only a day or so ago she’d been pondering why anyone would live anywhere other than in the country.

“YOP!” she tried finally. “Yop!”

That’s how the Whos got Horton’s attention, after all.

“Avalon? Is that you?”

Mac’s voice was right underneath the window. She nearly crumpled with relief. “Yes!”

A little silence. “Did you . . . did you just say yop?”

She hesitated. “I said a lot of other things before you showed up,” she hedged.

“I thought for a minute one of my goats had gotten out and a coyote had him. That must have been you.”

“Probably.”

“Are you . . . stuck up in the attic, by any chance?”

“Yes.”

There was more silence. “I’m guessing you kind of understand why I told you not to go up there.”

He was really going to make her work for it. The sheer effort of holding in his laughter was probably building yet another quadrant of muscle on his abdomen.

“Also?” she added. “There’s . . . something up here with me. Something that . . . moves.”

“Oh, you’ve met our ghost?”

“There’s a fucking ghost?” Her voice went up an octave.

“Don’t you guys have a ghost at the Misty Cat?”

“It’s less the idea of ghost than the context in which the ghost is currently occurring.”

“I see,” he said, gravely as an academic. “So if you passed the ghost in the hall on the way to the bathroom you’d high-five it. But it’s the dark . . . close . . . stuffy . . . cobwebby . . . attic that gives you pause?”

There was a beat of silence.

“It’s a her?”

“One of them is.”

The mothereffer was really enjoying himself.

“Um, Mac. Do you think you—oh God oh God oh God it moved again.”

She could see the shadow rearing up against the wall.

“That’s what she said.” His voice was trembling with laughter now.

The shadow shifted; she thought she saw a needlelike nose.

“Oh, I think it’s just a possum.” She was somewhat relieved. “Wow, that thing is big. And not cute. At least it’s not moving fast.”

“Those things can be mean. And they’ll eat just about anything. It’s probably hungry. Maybe even rabid, if it’s moving slow.”

“You really are a dick, Mac.”

“I really am,” he agreed with purely evil placidity.

He fell silent again.

“Mac?” She hated that her voice was a trifle querulous.

He was instantly as brisk as a sergeant. “Okay, honey, let’s get you out of there.”

Did he just call her honey? Exactly as if he’d done it dozens of times before? Funny how instantly comforting the word was.

She had no idea how he planned to get into the house, but apparently that was no challenge. She heard footsteps thundering right below her within about a minute.

“Avalon, can you hear me?” he shouted up.

“Yes!”

“I’m going to ram that door open and then we’ll just lower you down on my shoulders. I can handle it. Should be nice and cushy.”

“Cushy?”

Though ramming something sounded hopelessly macho. The very word gave her a little thrill.

“Good cushy. Like a peach. Your butt will feel like one of those neck pillows you carry onto airplanes.”

She closed her eyes and growled a lament that tapered into a colorful string of muttered curses. “I’m glad I can entertain you, Mac.”

“It’s just different, is all.” She heard the laughter in his voice. “I was outside fixing the sprinklers on my property. I’ve done that at least a dozen times before. I’ve never done this before. Stand well back from the door. Way back. I’m going to count to three and go in for the punch.”

“Standing back now.”

The pointy-nosed possum ducked back into the shadows, as if it was listening to the whole conversation. Or maybe it was simply achieving a better position from which to pounce.

“One . . . two . . . THREE.”

BAM!

The door rocketed open in a cloud of dust and Mac’s head poked up into the darkness, dust sifting down all around him like he’d just been conjured.

“Hi,” he said.His smile might as well have been a lantern in the dim light. “Scooch forward and dangle your legs down through the opening. I’ll turn around and we’ll get you down on my shoulders.”

He vanished again.

She scooched as ordered and perched on the edge and peered down into Mac’s up-tilted face.

“I can see right into your nostrils,” she said.

“Don’t get hypnotized by their depths. You’re going to need to have your wits about you. Okay, I’m going to turn around now and we’re just going to eeeaaaase you down onto my shoulders. How’s your upper body strength? You’re going to need some. Mine is stupendous.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She wasn’t going to mention that her upper body, every bit of it, was stiff from scraping wallpaper from the wall. But she didn’t have it in her to admit to a weakness in front of Mac.

She scooted forward, pressing her palms down on the dusty attic floor behind her to brace herself, and he maneuvered beneath her just as her foot swung down and brushed his face.

She saw his nose bend a little to the left.

“Ow! Watch the shoes! That’s my nose!”

“Sorry, sorry!” Oh, God. This was already mortifying and she wasn’t even on top of his shoulders yet, like some drunk twenty-something at Coachella right before she ripped her top off and waved it around her head.

Mac gripped her ankles loosely but firmly. His hands slid up a little farther, maybe to gain purchase, maybe to savor a bit, but there was no way he didn’t encounter a little razor stubble. This was easily the least sexy thing she’d ever done with a man as an adult. Nevertheless, a current that could only be described as lust shot from his hand right into her privates.

When his hands began gliding up her calves to clamp on top of her thighs, her head felt light as a balloon.

Of all the ways she had imagined touching Mac Coltrane again, none of them involved him guiding her on down like he was a foreman on the Golden Gate Bridge supervising a girder into place.

But her poor stiff arms wobbled as she lowered herself down and she landed a little too hard on board that shelf of shoulders, which made her arms windmill wildly, which sent him into a staggering lunge to the left to avoid the stair wreckage. She compensated by flexing her thighs to stay on top.

“Avalon, don’t squeeze with your thighs, for the love of God! That’s my carotid artery! I’ll black out.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” She relaxed her thigh grip but she didn’t know where to put her hands unless it was to thrust them out parallel to the ground, à la an airplane, or grip his ears like handlebars. He hoisted his knee and took one Frankenstein-esque step forward. Which tipped her hard to the left.

She squeaked and reflexively seized handfuls of his hair and yanked back hard, like a rodeo queen ten seconds away from clinching the championship.

He gave a muffled squawk of pain, pivoted abruptly, staggered in a semicircle like a dreidel losing steam, barreled at a forward run toward the beanbag chair, shouted, “Look out!” and dumped her into it.

She bounced once and lay still.

It seemed unduly silent after that.

It was safe to say it was a stunned sort of silence.

She slowly, slowly turned her eyes up to his.

They stared at each other in something like mortified, almost impressed, slightly accusatory amazement. As if neither one of them had realized such thorough mutual indignity was even possible as adults.

His face was scarlet, either with exertion or pain or mortification—and his hair was standing up in little peaks all over like whitecaps whipped up on a bay.

She was pretty sure she was the same color. Judging from her temperature.

“Maybe we should have gotten a ladder,” she offered. Subdued.

“Maybe,” he said shortly.

More silence. He was still staring at her with an expression that suggested he thought she might be as possessed as the possum up there in the attic.

She cleared her throat. “Thank you. And . . . I’m sorry.”

Her parents had always taught her those were the go-to words when a situation was untenable.

He could take them however he wished.

He just shook his head to and fro, to and fro, slowly and wonderingly. Then rotated his neck experimentally.

She didn’t hear any grinding noises.

She was desperately glad she hadn’t broken him.

And then he frowned faintly. “Wait. You’re sorry about going up in the attic or about . . .”

“I’m sorry about needing to be rescued,” she said firmly. “I’m very sorry I inconvenienced you. I’m . . . sorry I squeezed your neck and pulled your hair.”

Why did their conversations always devolve into something that sounded like an exchange between two kids on the playground?

“It’s very soft,” she added. Lamely. “Your hair.”

His expression teetered somewhere between hilarity and censure.

“I think your cheek says ‘Skechers,’” she said, quietly, when he didn’t seem inclined to speak.

He swiped at his cheek absently. He missed the “S” completely. She didn’t say anything. He’d get around to noticing it eventually. If she was a guy who looked like him she’d be looking in the mirror all the time.

“I’m a little stiff from working on the wallpaper. Otherwise my balance would have been a little better.”

“Yeah?” he said abstractedly.

She nodded silently. Like a shy three-year-old.

“Hey, where’s your guard dog?” he asked.

“Chick Pea,” Avalon called. Then louder, “CHICK PEA!”

A few seconds later, they heard the click-click-click of tiny nails progressing sedately through the hall. Chick Pea trotted merrily into the room, smiling a doggie smile and went straight to Avalon, the very picture of blissful obliviousness.

She bent down to scratch her head. “I think she might be a little deaf.”

She glanced up at Mac. Judging from his silence and his expression, he was expending significant internal effort to refrain from saying something. “I told you so.” Or something in that vein.

She kept her face down. The silence elongated.

“Simon Le Bon. John Bonham. Janis Joplin. Sarah Vaughan. Robert Plant. Bob Marley. Baba O’Riley.”

She levered her head slowly up in amazement.

He’d recited these names almost defiantly. It sounded like he was reading a list of war dead.

“What . . .” She wondered if she’d damaged her hearing or her brain in the stair crash.

“Those are the names of my goats.”

She stared at him. A flush painted her to her hairline.

“Say them in a goat voice in your head,” he urged.

Simon Le Baaaan, John Baaaanham, Janis Jaaaaaplin, Sarah Vaaaaughan, Raaabert Plant, Baaaaab Marley . . . Baaa Baaa O’Riley.

Wow, that was hilarious. And touching. Vivid and so . . . so him.

Shame made her face go even hotter. She’d accused him of not caring about anything. It was a fairly terrible thing to say to anyone. It had been calculated to hurt him, to jar him into some sort of truth or revelation.

It had worked, though. If she were being scrupulously honest with herself, she wasn’t entirely sorry.

“They’re very good names,” she said, quietly.

His eyes widened again. For a moment there his face was luminous with some complicated emotion.

“My chickens have names, too.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

He went quiet again.

“Avalon . . . why did you go up in the attic?” he asked finally. The tone wasn’t entirely gentle.

She didn’t think she could pull off “because you told me not to.” The mood of the moment somehow didn’t support glibness.

She just looked up at him wordlessly, and widened her eyes in rueful apology.

He just shook his head, slowly. “Avalon . . . I just . . .” He sighed. As if he was about to deliver a truth he was weary of repeating. “All I want is for you to be safe.”

And she realized that it was, in fact, true.

Inherent in Mac was a quality of caring that informed his actions.

Even if the words coming out of his mouth implied something else altogether.

She folded her hands together in her lap and looked down at them. Chastened and subdued and suddenly rather confused.

Neither of them spoke for a moment or two. Chick Pea panted quietly next to her.

Finally she lifted her eyes to his.

The corner of his mouth dented a little.

“Hey,” he said suddenly, softly. “You’ve brought a cobweb down with you.”

He bent a little in front of her. She could see in his eyes as though they were crystal balls. What she saw was a rapt girl, frozen as if he were a wizard casting a spell.

His hand reached out slowly toward her hair and he delicately freed the strand.

He handed it to her as if it were forensic evidence, or a strand of rare silk.

She watched herself, as if from above, take that damned cobweb like he was handing her his letterman jacket.

Their fingertips brushed when the transfer was made. And just that little brush turned her thoughts to white noise. Ssssssss. Like lightning had taken out the cable.

He had had his hands on her ankles and pretty close to the seat of all desire, there, at the crook of her legs.

But somehow it was this tender intimacy that undid her.

She could all but feel herself unravel, as if she herself were made of something as fine as cobwebs.

She couldn’t look up at him because she was afraid he’d see the pulse thumping in her throat.

In that moment, a moment that lasted forever and just a few seconds, everything she considered herself to be, all of her achievements to date, finally, figuratively, softly collapsed like a house of cards. Inside crouched the teenage girl she once was: lustful and confused and madly, recklessly in love, heartbroken and not good enough for him.

She realized in a blinding flash that her entire life to date, from GradYouAte to overeducated Corbin, might very well be an I-told-you-so born of that long-ago moment: Mac had blown her off course.

She looked up at him and prayed that nothing of what she’d just realized was in her face.

She discovered that his face was still. He seemed a little tense about the mouth.

He finally straightened and drew in a long sharp breath.

“Well, then. Guess I can chalk this little episode up to be careful what you wish for.”

He said this mostly to himself. And with that ironic, cryptic little statement, he turned around and headed down the stairs.

But she didn’t hear that fourth step groan.

He must know that he needed to skip it.

Mac had in fact gotten into the house by shoving a window in the living room open wide enough to squeeze through. It hadn’t been easy, though. That particular window frame was going to need scraping and sanding and repainting, if she was serious about getting the place ship-shape before she sold it. He wondered if Avalon intended to attempt to undertake that particularly nasty job all on her own. It was nothing but methodical, relentless grunt work, all dust and splinters.

But then, scraping layers off things was never painless.

It was every bit as beautiful as he remembered.

“Hey, Cat,” he said to The Cat, who appeared and fell into a long-legged stride alongside him, as if they were a couple of rogue detectives out on a case.

But he was, in fact, feeling a little subdued.

He just . . . found it less and less easy to leave her every time he was in her presence. Even when he couldn’t get away fast enough.

Even though every encounter seemed to flay a fine layer from him.

He knew how that kind of work could be a very effective form of purging and self-flagellation. But he could tell she was already stiff from it. She wasn’t a common farmer like he was, used to laboring away.

He smiled crookedly at himself. He liked being who he was.

Didn’t he?

But there had to be some other reason she was here all by herself, going at that huge house.

When he got home, he followed a hunch and whipped open his laptop and navigated to SilliPutty, scrolling through items.

There was a little jab in the area of his heart when he saw it.

Mac leaned back against the chair and blew out a breath.

Well, well, well.

He was both grateful and irritated on Avalon’s behalf that someone on her staff was loose-lipped or bribable. The notion that she might be hurting, and not just thanks to wallpaper scraping, bothered him a lot, though.

He mulled.

He knew what he really wanted to do right now. And wasn’t he a guy who got what he wanted?

And yet he couldn’t remember his pulse going like this the last time he went after something he wanted.

Maybe the stakes just hadn’t been high enough before.