She abandoned the email answering a few minutes later and, on the theory that a little exercise might burn off her restless mood, began washing the walls in preparation for painting them.

And then she saw them: the Bluetooth speakers she’d hauled in from her trunk, the ones she was supposed to give to Corbin. They were a dazzling bit of technology that could make your house sound like Coachella was trapped inside.

Or . . . outside.

She abandoned the wall washing.

And set to work with the cool-headed purpose of an assassin assembling a bomb.

She was just ahead of him, so close her hair flew out behind her and lashed his face. His lungs burned with the effort to keep up.

She scrambled up Devil’s Leap as nimbly as a mountain goat, and he was just about to reach out, to drag his fingertips along her shoulder blades in a tag, to make her turn around so he could pull her into his arms. Something seized him by both arms and yanked him back so hard his head snapped; he looked down upon the strong hands of his father, that old gold wedding ring, the hairy forearms, the tendons straining as they gripped him fast. And as he fought to free himself, Avalon stopped and looked at him then, her eyes radiating warmth. She stretched out her hand and uncurled her fingers; in her palm was the little stone heart he’d found for Trixie the Squirrel’s grave. Then she spun around and hurled it far, far out into the water. It sank below.

She leaped in after it. She sank. And didn’t come up.

“Avalon!” he screamed, his feet scrabbling in place like Fred Flintstone in his little car. And finally his father’s hands were gone. Instead, one of his favorite goats, Baaa Baaaa O’Riley, was standing up there with him.

“You win some, you lose some,” the goat said.

Which struck Mac as a pretty cavalier thing for a talking goat to say. “That’s not very nice,” he said, quite stung.

And then the goat opened its mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.

Holy fucking—!

Mac jackknifed out of deep sleep into a sitting position, his heart pounding like a floor tom, his arms helicoptering around his head reflexively to ward off an attack.

He was panting as if he’d actually made that run all the way up to the rock.

That was it: no more pizza before bedtime.

His lungs were still heaving. Which was why it took him another millisecond to become aware that it wasn’t a goat scream that had terrified him out of sleep. Rather an actual, keening, tormented cry had sliced right through his dreams like an icy cutlass.

Gooseflesh raced over his body. All the hairs on his skin leaped erect.

What the fucking hell was that?

A . . . siren? An air raid?

No. No siren could sound so sort of . . . personally anguished.

The sound was definitely human.

In a single fluid motion he scrambled nudely up out of bed, seized his twelve-gage shotgun, shoved the window up, and cocked the gun.

The sound rose and fell. Dirgelike.

It was actually another second or two before his violated senses and assaulted nerves could reassemble and work together to draw a conclusion. And when he did he slammed the window shut again and stared at it blankly.

Oh, yeah. It was human, all right.

A very particular human: Melissa Manchester.

More specifically, it was the Melissa Manchester song “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”

From the sound of things, broadcast through speakers the size of boxcars.

Every wailed note and histrionic piano chord was delivered with pristine clarity.

He moved gingerly, slowly, pensively, locked his gun and hung it back up on the wall.

He tentatively opened the front door. He was tempted to hold his breath, as if he was plunging into noxious gas. He stepped outside.

Holy shit.

However it was accomplished—God knows they made teeny speakers these days that could produce just about the same amount of noise—the sound felt loud enough to crumble the walls of Jericho, or to be mistaken for the kind of fracking that could cause earthquakes three states away.

He was held motionless in a veritable net of sound. It was like the trees, the hills, the very ground and air were singing.

Singing the worst, the worst song in the whole world.

The execution of this fiendish plot had been diabolically skillful.

He stood, still naked, in that storm of sound, buffeted by a full dozen more emotions, which was about double the number that had even twinged him in the last few years.

But he was shocked by the impression he decided to nourish.

It was: she remembered.

Avalon remembered I hate that song.

He’d mentioned it to her maybe once in his entire life, and there was a very good reason why he’d never mentioned it again.

But she’d remembered.

He imagined a shrink would have a field day with the fact that, in the middle of his righteous and quite justified outrage, a perverse little pilot light of joy glowed.

Because if she’d remembered a stupid little thing like that, he had a hunch she remembered everything. Because that’s what you did when someone meant something to you. You hoarded every little detail you could.

How long had it been since he’d felt truly known? Something in him that he hadn’t known was tense shifted a little. Like he’d been given just a skosh more leg room on a flight.

He stood there until the song ended, as if to make sure an attacking army really was in retreat.

He sucked in a long, long breath, as if the air was finally clean again.

Well. Points to Avalon. It was a helluva way to wake up.

He turned and went back into the house, hefted a bag of kibble and poured some into The Cat’s bowl.

The Cat, unoffended by being jounced out of bed unceremoniously by Mac’s sudden leap out of it and who had in fact hopped back in and stolen his warm spot, jumped down, did a sort of nonchalant downward dog stretch and headed for his bowl. The Cat always rebounded swiftly from the many vicissitudes of humans, and never seemed to hold any grudges. In this way he and Mac were probably a little different.

Mac stepped outside again and stretched his arms luxuriously upward into the chilly morning. He’d been contemplating planting about a quarter acre with winter crops, and he needed to clean up the rest of the hydrangeas he’d trimmed behind the Devil’s Leap house and get as much work out of the way as possible during this warm spell, including trimming branches near the roof and cutting back the oleander.

He started the coffee, pulled on some clothes, and dozily communed with six deer moseying down the road, who all turned big limpid brown eyes on him, eyes which reminded him of the very person who was torturing him with Melissa Manchester.

The Cat came to sit next to him and wash his face. Mac always talked to The Cat. “Looks like it’s going to be a beautif—”

DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun . . .

He froze, blank with a sort of dark amazement as the sound hammered his nerves like they were piano strings.

The motherfucking song was starting all over again.

Well.

Now he knew how it would go down.

It was horrible. And original and impish and fiendish. Precisely the sort of thing he’d expect from the girl who’d once turned the top of Devil’s Leap into a tap dancing stage, who had once put acorns into an Easy-Bake Oven recipe and had then needed to go to the hospital for a stomach ache, who had suggested they all pretend to be mummies and walk off the edge with their arms outstretched. What if she did this every day?

Now the game really was on.

Later, when he stalked down to get his mail, Avalon was standing at the mailboxes, shuffling through hers like a Vegas gambler who knows she has the winning hand. He had a hunch she’d been waiting there for him to show up.

“Oh, hey, Mac.”

“Kicking out the jams today, are we, Avalon?”

She looked up, her velvety eyes innocent and questioning. “Don’t you like my taste in music?”

“IT’S NOT MUSIC AND IT’S NOT TASTE.”

Her eyes widened very slightly.

He took a subtle breath.

“Gosh, I didn’t mean to upset you, Mac,” she said very, very mildly. A little furrow crumpled the smooth tawny skin between her brows.

“I’m not upset,” he modulated, perhaps a little too much. Because now he sounded like an announcer on NPR. He’d tried to work with earplugs in. It hadn’t quite done the trick.

“Well, it’s just that you raised your voice just now,” she pointed out, reasonably, and still so, so sympathetically.

“Well, it’s just that I thought I needed to because I thought you might be losing your hearing in your old age. Given the volume of your chosen ‘music.’” He bent his fingers in air quotes around that last word.

“Ohhhhh, that. I just wanted to be able to hear it wherever I went in the house. And it’s a big house. As you know. Cavernous. So roomy and so comfortable and so very, very . . . mine.”

A bird oblivious to the gravity of their showdown trilled like it was Beverly Sills and this was La Traviata.

“Don’t you think the birds and the squirrels and deer mind the noise?” Mac suggested.

“Don’t they mind the music, you mean?” she corrected, her nose wrinkled fetchingly in faux confusion.

“I meant the noise,” he repeated evenly.

She shrugged indolently with one shoulder. “Animals often love music, Mac. I’m sure they’ll get used to it. It’s just that I sometimes get in the mood for an inspirational, motivational ballad. And I never know when the mood might strike. Sometimes it strikes very, very late at night. Sometimes it doesn’t ease up until morning.”

“Is that so, Avalon? Get lonely and bored late at night, do you, these days? Need to burn off a little angst?”

He detected a blip in her aplomb. A hesitation.

That was interesting. What was up with the boyfriend?

“Why do you hate that song so much?” she asked suddenly.

“I hate the belabored circus metaphor, what with the clowns and tightropes and whatnot. I hate that she’s advising people to keep all the feelings inside, which, my God, strikes me as terrible advice. And that she’s actually yelling about not crying out loud, which, I mean—how does that make any sense? I don’t like advice yelled at me from a song.”

“I think Miss Manchester would characterize it as singing,” she said finally. Sounding subdued. But she looked dazzled. Her eyes were lit with hilarity.

“Miss Manchester would be deluded.”

“She has some good songs. ‘Midnight Blue.’ Pretty good song.” Now she was messing with him.

He waved this opinion away with an impatient chop of his hand.

“I like songs like . . . like that Baby Owls song. About being lost in the forest and going around and around and around. Perfectly adequate lyrics. Keep it simple. Lost in the forest, going round and around and around. Happens to someone every day, right? Not this sentimental histrionic dreck.”

“Yeah, but that Baby Owls song is kind of existential, when you think about it. The round and around is meant to symbolize the circle of—”

Mac clapped his hands over his ears. “LALALALALALA.”

She smiled.

He smiled, too.

“You used to like Roxy Music,” he ventured quietly, into the delicate, soft little silence.

“Maybe my tastes have changed.”

“Maybe you’re lying.”

She didn’t disagree with this. But she was restless now; her eyes had gone guarded and cool.

“I think the only stupid thing about that song is that the singer gets back up on that tightrope over and over even though she falls off and gets hurt over and over again. Every time.”

That sure sounded like a message. Maybe a warning.

He didn’t much care for innuendo. Some instinct of self-preservation prevented him from poking at it.

“Hey, Avalon?” Mac said suddenly. “You know what else the deer and squirrels might not appreciate?”

He reached into his back pocket and withdrew the thing he’d found while he was trimming back some oleander. He gave a little flick of his wrist.

Her blue bra unfurled and fluttered in the breeze, twisting and dancing gaily from his fingers.

“Littering,” he said.

She stared at it. Hilarity and outrage mingling in her face; her cheeks went pink. It was about as adorable as it gets.

Then she snatched it from his fist. “I was wondering where that got to,” she said.

She was smiling when she returned to the house. Despite herself. It was just that Mac’s explanation for why he didn’t like that song was so at the ready, so idiosyncratic, so him, that everything in her leaped with pleasure at its force and originality. She remembered that Mac had kind of felt, in fact, like a song you could really dance to. Or the kind like, say, “Stairway to Heaven,” with soft parts and loud parts and crescendos.

And she was happy to get her bra back.

And she understood something else clearly in that moment: Corbin’s ethos of rejecting anything commonplace did not in and of itself constitute taste. Or a personality. It was what he did because he didn’t know himself; it was what he did because he feared, and probably rightly, that he just wasn’t terribly interesting.

It was quite an epiphany.

And Mac had remembered about Roxy Music.

Something soft, something perilously teenage, something that felt like hope, turned her insides tingly until she ruthlessly squelched it. After all, he’d soundly mocked her fantasy about slow dancing out there on Devil’s Leap. And he was still that guy who had no patience for spectacle.

So she kept “Don’t Cry Out Loud” going at whimsical intervals all day while she washed her walls. Just to show him she meant business, until about nine thirty at night.

Which was when the fuse blew.

Instant blackness was accompanied by a sort of groaning sigh that spelled the expiration of all lights and appliances.

She froze where she stood, a Hot Pocket with one bite out of it clutched in one fist and a Jellystone Park glass full of iced tea in the other.

“Huh.”

The living room had become a cavern. The corners she’d swept so thoroughly were suddenly dense with shadowy mystery. Out the big windows the dark was that kind of thick-textured, velvety purple dark that you only get in the country. Trees speared up into it.

She used a slanting stripe of moonlight as a road to get to the couch, which was where, serendipitously, she’d propped her lantern. She settled her Hot Pocket and her tea down on the overturned box reincarnated as a coffee table, curled up on the sofa that smelled like her family’s rec room and therefore her family, and pressed a number on her cell phone.

“Hey, pumpkin.”

“Hey, Dad. When you were prowling around outside, did you happen to notice where the breaker box was? Asking for a friend.”

A little silence, during which he probably stifled an “I told you so.”

“So are you sitting there in the pitch dark?” He sounded amused.

Her dad was smart.

“I have my lantern. And the glow of my cell phone. And the moonlight is rather picturesque on these hardwood floors. It’s illuminating all the scratches.” She aimed the lantern beam at the back wall and made a shadow dog with her hand. That was a mistake. In this light it looked more like the Loch Ness monster than a dog and there were enough unidentifiable shadows as it was.

“That house has a fuse box, not a breaker box. It’s outside behind that little round door. You got any fuses handy?”

“Sure, Dad, I got a whole box full of fuses right here.”

“You do?” Her dad sounded so touched and thrilled she was instantly filled with remorse.

“Sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t tease you like that. Do fuses even come in boxes? Can you order them with an app?”

He snorted. “Do you have lights in the other parts of the house?”

Ava cast her gaze up the stairs. The entire flight was so dark she couldn’t distinguish one step from another from where she sat. The light switch at the top might as well be down a deep, dark well. Moonlight threw shivering shadows of pine boughs against the wall, thanks to the big windows.

“Mmm, yeah,” she said vaguely. “I think so.”

“What were you doing when you blew the fuse?”

“Um . . . listening to music and heating something up in the microwave.” It wasn’t a total lie, but she crossed her fingers. “I think the refrigerator is on that fuse, too, though I don’t have too much stuff in there that can go bad.”

“You know how to get into the basement?”

She hesitated.

“Yep.”

“You can do it, pumpkin. Maybe the groundskeeper has a fuse.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

She might be a grown woman, but “you can do it pumpkin” would never lose its motivating power, and that’s why she’d called him instead of Googling.

She hooked the lantern over her arm and headed out the door into the deep dark, down the flagstone path.

Five feet away from Mac’s front door a cloud shifted and Avalon stopped cold and tilted her head back. The half moon hung up there like a neon sign over the door of a heavenly speakeasy. Behind it, a million stars pinned the blue velvet sky up in place.

It was preposterously beautiful and so strange when you really thought about it, that enormous radiant shape in the sky.

Honestly, it was so dumbfoundingly gorgeous in the country all at once it felt like insanity to live anywhere else.

She took in a long, long breath for courage. To attempt to settle her hammering heart.

Exhaled.

She raised her hand to rap on the door.

It flew open before her knuckles even brushed it. She was treated to a backlit glimpse of pillow-rumpled hair, a lamplight-burnished torso partitioned in muscles as satiny and distinct as quadrants on a Hershey bar, low-clinging red boxers, and a jaw shadowed in stubble.

The impact was a bit like taking a mallet to the head. Her ears literally rang from the sheer sensory input.

“Hold out your hand, Ava.” His voice was gruff from sleep.

Her hand, much to her chagrin, was already kind of out. What in God’s name was she going to do with it? Strum her hand down those muscles like she was playing a xylophone solo? Reflexively touch each quadrant, like a child learning to count?

He slapped a fuse into her hand.

And when it seemed she wouldn’t move he slowly, gently curled her fingers closed over it.

And bang.

Shut the door again.

Shot the bolt.

And killed the lights.

She stood motionless. From just that little touch, her entire self seemed to be humming like a plucked string. How about that? Her subconscious had known he had amazing abs.

The first step she took away from the door was a little unsteady.

The next one was more certain.

Because she’d lay odds he was still watching. And she’d be damned if she’d let on that he’d rattled her.

For some reason, the notion that he was looking out for her was as disturbing and comforting and oddly beautiful as the moon.

It was cold and he didn’t heat the house at night, but Mac stood in his bare feet and boxers and tweezed open his blinds with two fingers to watch Avalon move through the dark, find the basement door, fumble with the keys, then vanish inside.

And despite the fact that she richly deserved a foray into the spidery basement in the deepest dark of night, he was rooting for her.

Because with some logic he barely understood but which was having its way with him now, because his mind was sleepy, it seemed like the world itself wouldn’t be safe unless she was.

And so when the lights blazed on again in the house he smiled.

And a few minutes later, when the lights went back out again, he decided to go back to bed.

He folded his arms around the back of his head and smiled.

Because she was safe, sure. Because of the look on her face when she’d gotten a look at him in those boxers.

But also because of what he had in store for her tomorrow.